KnowPath: An LLM-Supported Knowledge Graph Construction and Path Finding Framework to Explainable MOOC Recommendations

The proliferation of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has created an urgent need for advanced course recommendation systems (RS). Course recommendations in MOOCs require transparent motivations to justify course selection, as there are often many courses with the same title, but which vary widely in content, duration, learning resources provided, and the academic authority of the instructor. Explainable recommendations are crucial to ensure that recommended courses fit well with learners’ needs and increase the chance of successful course completion, but unfortunately existing RS for MOOCs struggle to provide explainable recommendations. In this article, we present KnowPath , a novel RS for MOOCs, which generates effective and explainable recommendations. KnowPath uses open source Large Language Models (LLMs) to construct knowledge graphs (KGs) capable of accurately capturing complex relationships between MOOC entities (e.g., learners, instructors, educational resources) and employs Reinforcement Learning to align the output of an LLM with learner preferences. Extensive experiments on two public datasets (XueTang and COCO) demonstrate the superior performance and generalizability of KnowPath , underlining its potential to revolutionize the field of personalized online education.