Research on an MOOC Recommendation Method Based on the Fusion of Behavioral Sequences and Textual Semantics

To address the challenges of user behavior sparsity and insufficient utilization of course semantics on MOOC platforms, this paper proposes a personalized recommendation method that integrates user behavioral sequences with course textual semantic features. First, shallow word-level features from course titles are extracted using FastText, and deep contextual semantic representations from course descriptions are obtained via a fine-tuned BERT model. The two sets of semantic features are concatenated to form a multi-level semantic representation of course content. Next, the fused semantic features are mapped into the same vector space as course ID embeddings through a linear projection layer and combined with the original course ID embeddings via an additive fusion strategy, enhancing the model’s semantic perception of course content. Finally, the fused features are fed into an improved SASRec model, where a multi-head self-attention mechanism is employed to model the evolution of user interests, enabling collaborative recommendations across behavioral and semantic modalities. Experiments conducted on the MOOCCubeX dataset (1.26 million users, 632 courses) demonstrated that the proposed method achieved NDCG@10 and HR@10 scores of 0.524 and 0.818, respectively, outperforming SASRec and semantic single-modality baselines. This study offers an efficient yet semantically rich recommendation solution for MOOC scenarios.