Abstract

Custom learning focuses on understanding the unique learning styles of students. This strategy will allow us to adapt educational content and methodology for personalized learning experiences that differ from one student to another. The objective of this study is to discuss the development of systems for recommending educational content based on learning styles that manage and recommend content to students for improving academic performance. This study was carried out in three stages: (1) a preliminary study that considers establishing content preferences based on learning styles; (2) the development of a content recommender system called “Custom Learning;” and (3) an evaluation of the academic performance of the students who used the recommender system. The results obtained regarding the preference of the content format concerning the learning style shows that the converging and assimilating learning styles respond more readily to content in video format, while the divergent and accommodating groups prefer the simulation format. These results were obtained from the application of two surveys to 128 students in software courses at an Ecuadorian university. The effect on academic performance shows an improvement in student performance. After analyzing the means of the data, the experimental group obtained a higher performance than the control group, showing an improvement of 14.3 percent. Therefore, it can be concluded that using an educational content recommender system improves students ‘academic performances.