ICAR Research Data Repository for Knowledge Management

Mandarine Academy Recommender System (MARS) Dataset is captured from real-world open MOOC {https://mooc.office365-training.com/}. The dataset offers both explicit and implicit ratings, for both French and English versions of the MOOC. Compared with classical recommendation datasets like Movielens, this is a rather small dataset due to the nature of available content (educational). However, the dataset offers insights into real-world ratings and provides testing grounds away from common datasets.

All items are available online for viewing in both French and English versions. All selected users had rated at least 1 item. No demographic information is included. Each user is represented by an id and job (if available).

For both French and English, the same kind of files is available in .csv format. We provide the following files:

• Users: contains information about user ids and their jobs.


• Items: contains information about items (resources) in the selected language. Contains a mix of feature types.


• Ratings: Both explicit (Watch time) and implicit (page views of items).

The dataset files are written as comma-separated values files with a single header row. Columns that contain commas (,) are escaped using double quotes ("). These files are encoded as UTF-8.

User ids are consistent between explicit_ratings.csv and implicit_ratings.csv and users.csv (i.e., the same id refers to the same user across the dataset).

Item ids are consistent between explicit_ratings.csv, implicit_ratings.csv, and items.csv (i.e., the same id refers to the same item across the dataset).

All ratings are contained in the files explicit_ratings.csv and implicit_ratings.csv. Each line of this file after the header row represents one rating of one item by one user, and has the following format:

• item_id,user_id,created_at (implicit_ratings.csv)


• user_id,item_id,watch_percentage,created_at,rating (explicit_ratings.csv)

Item information is contained in the file items.csv. Each line of this file after the header row represents one item, and has the following format:

• item_id,language,name,nb_views,description,created_at,Difficulty,Job,Software,Theme,duration,type