Association Rule Mining and Collaborative Filtering-Based Recommendation for Improving University Graduate Attributes

Outcome-based education (OBE) is a tried-and-true teaching technique based on a set of predetermined goals. Program Educational Objectives (PEOs), Program Outcomes (POs), and Course Outcomes (COs) are the components of OBE. At the end of each year, the Program Outcomes are evaluated, and faculty members can submit many recommended measures which dependent on the relationship between the program outcomes and its courses outcomes to improve the quality of program and hence the overall educational program. When a vast number of courses are considered, bad actions may be proposed, resulting in unwanted and incorrect decisions. In this paper, a recommender system, using collaborative filtering and association rules algorithms, is proposed for predicting the best relationship between the program outcomes and its courses in order to improve the attributes of the graduates. First, a parallel algorithm is used for Collaborative Filtering on Data Model, which is designed to increase the efficiency of processing big data. Then, a parallel similar learning outcomes discovery method based on matrix correlation is proposed by mining association rules. As a case study, the proposed recommender system is applied to the Computer Information Systems program, College of Computer Sciences and Information Technology, Al-Baha University, Saudi Arabia for helping Program Quality Administration improving the quality of program outcomes. The obtained results revealed that the suggested recommender system provides more actions for boosting Graduate Attributes quality.