Reliable Prerequisite-Aware Learning Path Recommendation under Uncertain Knowledge Structures: Long-Horizon Evaluation and Cross-Dataset Validation

M. M. Golam Hafiz, A. K. M. Shahriar Emtiaz, Safia Akter Simi, Md. Rakibul Islam, M. F. Mridha

Learning-path recommendation often depends on knowledge and prerequisite structures whose reliability is uncertain, while high accuracy in predicting the next resource does not necessarily establish reliable long-horizon path behaviour. This study develops a reliability-oriented prerequisite-aware framework that jointly examines immediate next-resource ranking, uncertain prerequisite structures, hard, soft and hybrid constraint semantics, graph robustness, and autoregressive path generation under course-level confirmatory evaluation and independent cross-dataset validation. Development used 3,187 MOOCCubeX courses, followed by a frozen confirmatory evaluation on 541 held-out courses and 37,747 transitions. The primary MOOCCubeX task is structural and course-prefix-conditioned rather than learner-personalised. Junyi provides independent structure-/hierarchy-aware external validation, uses hierarchy metadata rather than an explicit prerequisite graph and is not a zero-shot transfer setting. On the frozen MOOCCubeX evaluation, XGBoost pairwise was the strongest observed immediate ranker, with mean reciprocal rank (MRR) of 0.9048, whereas the proposed prerequisite-aware graph model…