Mining learner preferences and needs from individual learning behavior data is a critical task in course recommendation systems. While graph-based models have shown efficacy in capturing pairwise relationships between learners and courses, they often overlook the complex higher-order interactions involving learners, courses and teachers that are essential for accurate recommendations. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Hypergraph Convolutional Network for Course Recommendation (HCNCR) framework, designed to model these higher-order interactions effectively. Our approach constructs course and learner hypergraphs based on course attributes and learner similarity relations, respectively. By employing hypergraph convolution, we capture the intrinsic higher-order relationships within these hypergraphs. Additionally, we utilize graph convolutional layers on the learner-course bipartite graph to integrate embeddings derived from hypergraphs, achieving comprehensive representations of both learners and courses. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate that HCNCR significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in course recommendation tasks.

Identifying the epistemic emotions of learner-generated reviews in massive open online courses (MOOCs) can help instructors provide adaptive guidance and interventions for learners. The epistemic emotion identification task is a fine-grained identification task that contains multiple categories of emotions arising during the learning process. Previous studies only consider emotional or semantic information within the review texts alone, which leads to insufficient feature representation. In addition, some categories of epistemic emotions are ambiguously distributed in feature space, making them hard to be distinguished. In this article, we present an emotion-semantic-aware dual contrastive learning (ES-DCL) approach to tackle these issues. In order to learn sufficient feature representation, implicit semantic features and human-interpretable emotional features are, respectively, extracted from two different views to form complementary emotional-semantic features. On this basis, by leveraging the experience of domain experts and the input emotional-semantic features, two types of contrastive losses (label contrastive loss and feature contrastive loss) are formulated. They are designed to train the discriminative distribution of emotional-semantic features in the sample space and to solve the anisotropy problem between different categories of epistemic emotions. The proposed ES-DCL is compared with 11 other baseline models on four different disciplinary MOOCs review datasets. Extensive experimental results show that our approach improves the performance of epistemic emotion identification, and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning-based methods in learning more discriminative sentence representations.