More “stuff like this”…

Just a little follow on from the previous blog post…
Spurred on by comments from Lisa, I’m exploring if we can filter the recommendations so that they become more relevant to students in a specific academic school, or even to students on a specific course, and the initial results look fairly promising 🙂
Let’s look at a couple of examples:
International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy (ISSN 0144-333X)
Here are the recommendations based on usage by all users. A quick browse through the items shows a range of subject areas — social exclusion, economics, human resources, etc, and a student would need to sift through to spot the items relevant to their subject area.
Now let’s filter the recommendations so that they’re only based on usage by students in a specific academic school:

• Applied Sciences (which includes tourism and hospitality courses)
• Business
• Education and Professional Development
• Human and Health Sciences
• Music, Humanities and Media

…hopefully you can spot that the recommendations suddenly jump to becoming much more relevant to courses in that particular school.
Managerial Auditing Journal (ISSN 0268-6902)
Let’s drill a bit deeper this time and look at courses in the Business school:

• courses starting with “BA…”
• courses starting with “BM…”

Without knowing how our course codes are created, you can probably guess that courses starting with “BA…” are mostly accountancy & finance, and that those starting with “BM…” are to do with leadership and management.