Enhancing MOOC Recommendation Through Preference-Aware Knowledge Graph Diffusion and Temporal Sequence Modeling

Course recommendation is a critical service in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) that helps learners discover relevant courses from massive online educational platforms. Despite substantial progress in this field, two key challenges remain unresolved: (1) existing methods fail to leverage the differences in learners’ interests across different courses during knowledge propagation processes, and (2) while sequential relationships have been considered in course recommendations, there is still significant room for improvement in effectively integrating sequential patterns with knowledge-graph-based approaches. To overcome these limitations, we propose PGDB (Preference-aware Graph Diffusion network and Bi-LSTM), an innovative end-to-end framework for course recommendation. Our model consists of four key components: First, a course knowledge graph diffusion module recursively collects multiple knowledge triples related to learners to construct their knowledge background. Second, a preference-aware diffusion attention mechanism analyzes learners’ preferences for courses and relational paths using multi-head attention, effectively distinguishing semantic diversity across different contexts and capturing varying learner interests during knowledge transmission. Third, a temporal sequence modeling module utilizes bidirectional long short-term memory networks to identify learners’ interest evolution patterns, generating learner-dependent representations that efficiently leverage sequential relationships between courses. Finally, a prediction module combines the final representations of learners and courses to output selection probabilities for candidate courses. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that PGDB significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models across multiple evaluation metrics, validating the effectiveness of our approach in addressing data sparsity and sequential modeling challenges in course recommendation systems.