Recommender in AI-enhanced learning: An assessment from the perspective of instructional design

As tools for AI-enhanced human learning, recommender systems support learners in finding materials and sequencing learning paths. The paper explores how these recommenders improve the learning experience from a perspective of instructional design. It analyzes mechanisms underlying current recommender systems, and it derives concrete examples of how they operate: Recommenders are either expert-, criteria-, behavior-, or profile-based or rely on social comparisons. To verify this classification of five different mechanisms, we analyze a set of current publications on recommenders and find all the identified mechanisms with profile-based approaches as the most common. Social recommenders, though highly attractive in other sectors, reveal some drawbacks in the context of learning. In comparison, expert-based recommendations are easy to implement and often stand out as simple but effective ways for suggesting learning materials and learning paths to learners. They can be combined with other approaches based on social comparisons and individual profiles. The paper points out challenges in studying recommenders for learning and provides suggestions for future research.