Fair and explainable educational recommendations with a hybrid Graph-GRU framework

Artificial Intelligence (AI) recommender systems are increasingly used in education to personalize learning and help students navigate large collections of digital learning resources. However, many existing approaches emphasize predictive accuracy over fairness, robustness, diversity, and transparency. This creates an important educational challenge. The students with limited participation histories may receive less reliable support, while highly popular resources may dominate recommendation lists and limit access to other useful learning materials. To address this challenge, this study aims to develop and evaluate a responsible educational recommender framework that supports personalized learning resource navigation while making recommendation behavior more fair, stable, diverse, and explainable. This study introduces the Hybrid Heterogeneous Knowledge Graph-Gated Recurrent Unit (Hybrid HKG-GRU) framework, which combines heterogeneous graph embeddings with sequential modeling to capture both the relational structure of course materials and the temporal dynamics of learner interactions. The framework integrates three contributions: (i) multi-objective training with Group Distributionally Robust Optimization (GroupDRO), (ii) Maximum Marginal Relevance (MMR) reranking to reshape exposure patterns, and (iii) built-in, model-centric explainability through path-based and counterfactual analyses. The empirical evaluation shows strong predictive performance with HR@10 = 0.68 and MRR = 0.41 on Moodle LMS logs dataset that comprises of 152 students, 59 resources, and approximately 150k interactions. The model also achieves high intra-list diversity and moderate catalogue coverage, while showing moderate counterfactual stability for many learners (median CR@10 = 1.0), although catalogue-level popularity bias remains evident. The framework provides model-centric interpretability and verification intended to support more transparent educational recommendation. The study positions the framework as a technically auditable approach for improving how learning resources are recommended, inspected, and monitored in educational settings. By integrating fairness, robustness, and explainability as coequal design objectives, the Hybrid HKG-GRU provides a methodological foundation for more responsible and accountable recommender systems in education and related high-stakes contexts.