SkillAscend - AI-Powered Online Course Recommender

📌 Project Overview

SkillAscend is an AI-powered online course recommender system that provides personalized course recommendations based on a user's educational background and learning goals. It leverages a hybrid recommendation approach by combining collaborative filtering (SVD) and content-based filtering (BERT & TF-IDF) to suggest the most relevant courses dynamically.

🚀 Features

• Personalized Recommendations: Matches users with courses based on their education and career goals.
• Hybrid Recommendation Approach:
  • Collaborative Filtering (SVD): Predicts user preferences based on historical interactions.
  • Content-Based Filtering (BERT): Recommends courses by analyzing course descriptions and user profiles.
  • Real-Time NLP Pipeline: Updates recommendations dynamically as users interact with the system.
• User-Friendly Web App: Simple and interactive UI for seamless course discovery.

🏗️ Tech Stack

• ML: TensorFlow, scikit-learn, Surprise (SVD), Sentence Transformers (BERT), TF-IDF, Pandas, NumPy
• Backend: Flask, Hugging Face Spaces
• Frontend: React.js, Tailwind CSS, HTML

📂 Project Structure

SkillAscend/
│── data/                           # Dataset (Coursera courses & interactions)
│── models/                         # Trained models (SVD, BERT, TF-IDF)
│── backend/
│   ├── app.py                      # Flask backend for recommendations
│   ├── realtime_nlp.py              # Real-time NLP-based recommendation
│   ├── collaborative_filtering_svd.py  # SVD-based recommendation
│   ├── content_filtering_bert.py    # BERT-based content filtering
│   ├── content_filtering_tfidf.py   # TF-IDF-based content filtering
│── frontend/
│   ├── index.html                   # Web UI for recommendations
│   ├── static/                      # CSS, JavaScript, images
│── README.md                        # Project documentation
│── requirements.txt                  # Python dependencies

🔧 Installation & Setup

1. Clone the Repository:

   git clone https://github.com/your-username/SkillAscend.git
   cd SkillAscend

2. Install Dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Run the Backend:

   python backend/app.py

4. Access the Web App: Open http://127.0.0.1:5000/ in your browser.

📊 How It Works

1. User inputs their education and learning goals.
2. BERT & TF-IDF process the user profile and compute similarity with course descriptions.
3. SVD-based collaborative filtering predicts courses based on past user interactions.
4. The top 5 courses are recommended and displayed to the user.

💡 Future Improvements

• Support for multiple course providers (Udemy, edX, etc.)
• User authentication & profile saving
• Improved ranking with hybrid weighting techniques
• Integration with APIs for real-time course updates

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