Academic advising is limited in its ability to assist students in identifying academic pathways. Selecting a major and a university is a challenging process rife with anxiety. Students at high school are not sure how to match their interests with their working future or major. Therefore, high school students need guidance and support. Moreover, students need to filter, prioritize and efficiently get appropriate information from the web in order to solve the problem of information overload. This paper represents an approach for developing ontology-based recommender system improved with machine learning techniques to orient students in higher education. The proposed recommender system is an assessment tool for students' vocational strengths and weaknesses, interests and capabilities. The main objective of our ontology-based recommender system is to identify the student requirements, interests, preferences and capabilities to recommend the appropriate major and university for each one.

The recent development of the WorldWideWeb, information, and communications technology have transformed the world and moved us into the data era resulting in an overload of data analysis. Students at high school use, most of the time, the internet as a tool to search for universities/colleges, university?s majors, and career paths that match their interests. However, selecting higher education choices such as a university major is a massive decision for students leading them, to surf the internet for long periods in search of needed information. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to assist high school students through a hybrid recommender system (RS) that provides personalized recommendations related to their interests. To reach this purpose we proposed a novel hybrid RS approach named (COHRS) that incorporates the Knowledge base (KB) and Collaborative Filtering (CF) recommender techniques. This hybrid RS approach is supported by the Case based Reasoning (CBR) system and Ontology. Hundreds of queries were processed by our hybrid RS approach. The experiments show the high accuracy of COHRS based on two criteria namely the accuracy of retrieving the most similar cases and the accuracy of generating personalized recommendations. The evaluation results show the percentage of accuracy of COHRS based on many experiments as follows: 98 percent accuracy for retrieving the most similar cases and 95 percent accuracy for generating personalized recommendations.

Academic advising is inhibited at most of the high schools to help students identify appropriate academic pathways. The choice of a career domain is significantly influenced by the complexity of life and the volatility of the labor market. Thus, high school students feel confused during the shift period from high school to university, especially with the enormous amounts of data available on the Web. In this paper, an extensive comparative study is conducted to investigate five approaches of recommender systems for university study field and career domain guidance. A novel ontology is constructed to include all the needed information for this purpose. The developed approaches considered user-based and item-based collaborative filtering, demographic-based recommendation, knowledge base supported by case-based reasoning, ontology, as well as different hybridizations of them. A case study on Lebanese high school students is analyzed to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the implemented approaches. The experimental results indicate that the knowledge-based hybrid recommender system, combined with the user-based collaborative filtering and braced with case-based reasoning as well as ontology, generated 98% of similar cases, 95% of them are personalized based on the interests of the high school students. The average usefulness feedback and satisfaction level of the students concerning this proposed hybrid approach reached 95% and 92.5% respectively, which could be a solution to similar problems, regardless of the application domain. Besides, the constructed ontology could be reused in other systems in the educational domain.

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