Semantic–Sequential Educational Recommendation with Collaborative Enhancement and Parameter-Efficient Language Model Adaptation

The rapid evolution of online learning environments has generated diverse and complex data ecosystems. Recommender systems play a central role in leveraging such heterogeneous data to support personalised learning experiences. However, many deep learning-based recommender systems still rely on identifier-based representations that capture co-occurrence and collaborative patterns while overlooking the semantic information embedded in educational activities and the temporal dynamics of learner behaviour. To address these limitations, this study proposes a collaborative-enhanced semantic–sequential recommendation framework for educational platforms that combines structured semantic representation learning, sequential behavioural modelling, and collaborative preference modelling. The proposed architecture integrates a parameter-efficient MiniLM adaptation strategy to extract semantic representations from structured item-related educational metadata and a bidirectional recurrent encoder to model temporal learning patterns from behavioural logs. A gated fusion mechanism is then used to combine semantic and contextual information into learner representations, which are further integrated with collaborative user–item embeddings for top-K recommendation using a Bayesian personalised ranking objective. Experiments conducted on the EdNet-KT1 dataset under chronological splitting, full-corpus ranking, and fixed candidate-sampling protocols show that the collaborative-enhanced model achieves the highest-ranking performance among popularity-based, matrix factorisation, neural collaborative filtering, recurrent sequential, self-attention sequential, and ablation baselines. The model obtains an NDCG@10 of 0.1344 under full-corpus ranking and 0.5383 under candidate sampling, with statistically significant but practically modest improvements over the strongest baselines. Additional ablation, efficiency, and gate analyses indicate that semantic–contextual modelling is most effective when used as a residual enhancement to collaborative recommendation rather than as a standalone replacement. These results suggest that parameter-efficient semantic–sequential modelling, when combined with collaborative preference signals, offers a promising direction for scalable and evidence-based educational recommender systems.