RAMO: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Enhancing MOOCs Recommendations

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have significantly enhanced educational accessibility by offering a wide variety of courses and breaking down traditional barriers related to geography, finance, and time. However, students often face difficulties navigating the vast selection of courses, especially when exploring new fields of study. Driven by this challenge, researchers have been exploring course recommender systems to offer tailored guidance that aligns with individual learning preferences and career aspirations. These systems face particular challenges in effectively addressing the “cold start” problem for new users. Recent advancements in recommender systems suggest integrating large language models (LLMs) into the recommendation process to enhance personalized recommendations and address the “cold start” problem. Motivated by these advancements, our study introduces RAMO (Retrieval-Augmented Generation for MOOCs), a system specifically designed to overcome the “cold start” challenges of traditional course recommender systems. The RAMO system leverages the capabilities of LLMs, along with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-facilitated contextual understanding, to provide course recommendations through a conversational interface, aiming to enhance the e-learning experience.