Design and Evaluation of a Recommender System for Course Selection

Abstract

In this thesis we will construct a recommender system for course selection in higher education (more specifically, at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology). Some of what makes our approach novel compared with existing solutions is that we weight each user in the collaborative filtering process based on their chosen degree subject (major) and wether or not the two users being compared are friends. Also we utilize both collaborative filtering and content-based recommendations in a hybrid solution. Another novel aspect of our solution is that we construct our system on top of an existing website for rating courses. This gives us unique access to a dataset containing thousands of user-ratings of courses.