Online learning environments (OLE) are gaining popularity, including learning management systems (LMS) and massive open online courses (MOOCs), which are the best modern alternate solutions available for education in the current era. The luxury to learn irrespective of geographical and temporal restrictions makes it an attractive resource. At the start of 2020, the global pandemic enforced social distance practice worldwide, changing the work environment dynamics, leaving the people with options like online trading, work from home, and online education. The online learning environments gained particular attention in the educational sector, where users could access the online learning resources to fulfil their academic requirements during the lockdown. From massively available content such as MOOC, the learners are overwhelmed with the available choices. In this scenario, recommender systems (RS) come to the rescue to help the learner make appropriate choices for completing the enrolled course. There is tremendous scope and a multitude of opportunities available for researchers to focus on this domain. An exhaustive analysis is required to spotlight the opportunities in this realm. Various studies have been performed to provide such solutions in multiple areas of the MOOC recommendation systems (MOOCRS) such as course recommendation, learner peer recommendation, resource recommendations, to name a few. This is a compendious study into the research conducted in this area, identifying 670 articles out of 116 selected for analysis published from 2013 to 2021. It also highlights multiple areas in MOOC, where the recommendation is required, as well as technologies used by other researchers to provide solutions over time.
In the area of machine learning, different techniques are used to train machines and perform different tasks like computer vision, data analysis, natural language processing, and speech recognition. Computer vision is one of the main branches where machine learning and deep learning techniques are being applied. Optical character recognition (OCR) is the ability of a machine to recognize the character of a language. Pashto is one of the most ancient and historical languages of the world, spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan. OCR application has been developed for various cursive languages like Urdu, Chinese, and Japanese, but very little work is done for the recognition of the Pashto language. When it comes to handwritten character recognition, it becomes more difficult for OCR to recognize the characters as every handwritten character’s shape is influenced by the writer’s hand motion dynamics. The reason for the lack of research in Pashto handwritten character data as compared to other languages is because there is no benchmark dataset available for experimental purposes. This study focuses on the creation of such a dataset, and then for the evaluation purpose, a machine is trained to correctly recognize unseen Pashto handwritten characters. To achieve this objective, a dataset of 43000 images was created. Three Feed Forward Neural Network models with backpropagation algorithm using different Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) layer configurations (Model 1 with 1-ReLU Layer, Model 2 with 2-ReLU layers, and Model 3 with 3-ReLU Layers) were trained and tested with this dataset. The simulation shows that Model 1 achieved accuracy up to 87.6% on unseen data while Model 2 achieved an accuracy of 81.60% and 3% accuracy, respectively. Similarly, loss (cross-entropy) was the lowest for Model 1 with 0.15 and 3.17 for training and testing, followed by Model 2 with 0.7 and 4.2 for training and testing, while Model 3 was the last with loss values of 6.4 and 3.69. The precision, recall, and f-measure values of Model 1 were better than those of both Model 2 and Model 3. Based on results, Model 1 (with 1 ReLU activation layer) is found to be the most efficient as compared to the other two models in terms of accuracy to recognize Pashto handwritten characters.
Conducting and evaluating continuous student feedback is essential for any quality enhancement cell (QEC) within an education institution. Students' feedback based on their personal opinions can play a vital role in ensuring quality education. However, students' subjective opinions are often ignored due to time constraints or a lack of adequate analysis strategies. Therefore, to automate the quality assurance process, two classification models (i.e., based on Monkey learn API and SentiWord using TextBlob) are proposed to analyze students' feedback data. The results shows that the model employing MonkeyLearn performs nearly 22% points better than the Textblob on the Albanian language dataset obtained from 114 students' responses, achieving 72.12% accuracy.
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