Patent ID: 8457544

Claim:
A recommender system for making recommendations in educating students, the system comprising a processor executing a series of programmable instructions for: receiving, via an input system, a recommendation request for at least one current student; accessing a data storage facility storing student data, the student data including attributes associated with a plurality of current students and predecessor students, wherein at least one attribute associated with each predecessor student includes at least one educational resource used with the predecessor student; receiving at least one constraint and a weight value for applying to the at least one constraint, wherein the at least one constraint indicating which attribute to use for determining sameness between students, and the weight value indicating a strength of the attribute in making the determination of the sameness; clustering, via a processor, a first group of students into clusters based on the sameness, wherein the first group of students comprises a first one of predecessor students and current students; the clustering including: associating each student of the first group of students with a conceptual location in a multidimensional space including at least two dimensions, each dimension corresponding to an attribute and the location being defined by at least two attributes, and clustering the first group of students into clusters based on a distance between locations such that a cluster defines a conceptual region within the multidimensional space; mapping, via the processor, a second one of the predecessor and current students to the first group of students, the mapping including: for predecessor students in the first group of students, mapping each current student to a cluster of predecessor students based on a location of each current student in the multidimensional space relative to the cluster, and correlating each current student with an educational resource associated with one of a predecessor student in the cluster of predecessor students or the cluster of predecessor students, for current students in the first group of students, mapping a cluster of current students to one of a predecessor student or cluster of predecessor students based on a location of one of the predecessor student or the cluster of predecessor students in the multidimensional space relative to the cluster of current students, and correlating each current student to an educational resource used by the predecessor student or cluster of the predecessor students; and recommending for each of the current students the at least one educational resource associated with the predecessor student or cluster of predecessor students that the current student is mapped with.