State-of-the-Art Survey on Deep Learning-Based Recommender Systems for E-Learning

Recommender systems (RSs) are increasingly recognized as intelligent software for predicting users’ opinions on specific items. Various RSs have been developed in different domains, such as e-commerce, e-government, e-resource services, e-business, e-library, e-tourism, and e-learning, to make excellent user recommendations. In e-learning technology, RSs are designed to support and improve the learning practices of a student or an organization. This survey aims to examine the different works of literature on RSs that corroborate e-learning and classify and provide statistics of the reviewed articles based on their recommendation goals, recommendation techniques used, the target user, and the application platforms. The survey makes a prominent contribution to the e-learning RSs field by providing an overview of current research and traditional and nontraditional recommendation techniques to provide different recommendations for future e-learning. One of the most significant findings to emerge from this survey is that a substantial number of works followed either deep learning or context-aware recommendation techniques, which are considered more efficient than any traditional methods. Finally, we provided comprehensive observations from the quantitative assessment of publications, which can guide and support researchers in understanding the current development for potential future trends and the direction of deep learning-based RSs in e-learning.