Towards a virtual academic adviser
Date Issued
2011
Author(s)
Abstract
One of the major administrative processes at the Institute of
Informatics – the term enrollment, starts few weeks before the
start of each following term and ends a week after the start of
the courses. The students have to submit an enrollment
application for the academic term with a selection of courses
which then has to be approved by the academic adviser.
The latest changes of the legislation allow that only 50-
60% of the courses for each program can be mandatory,
whereas the rest of the courses can be chosen from other programs in the same institution or even from any program active
at the university. The role of the academic adviser is to help
the students with their choices and prevent them of making
costly mistakes that could prolong their studying. The
approval process is already done on-line [1], and the proposal
is to introduce a virtual academic adviser component that will
further ease this process by helping the majority of students,
leaving only the truly problematic to be dealt off-line.
The virtual adviser is a component that presents a visual
map of all of the previously enrolled terms and the courses
selections in each term to a student. It gives the student
measures of his success in comparison to other students. The
student can see his speed in acquiring and passing credits and
compare it with the average of his generation. Further, the
future academic terms of the student are mapped according to
his average speed and his graduation date is forecasted. The
component will enable the student to perform what-if
scenarios and change his load, change plan/program,
rearrange courses in order to come up with the best plan until
graduation.
This component will also enable future addition of
intelligent recommendation system modules that may
evaluate the capability of each student and his academic
performance parameters, compare them to a historical
database and suggest an optimally achievable adapted study
plan to the student that may lead him to faster completion
and/or higher GPA.
Informatics – the term enrollment, starts few weeks before the
start of each following term and ends a week after the start of
the courses. The students have to submit an enrollment
application for the academic term with a selection of courses
which then has to be approved by the academic adviser.
The latest changes of the legislation allow that only 50-
60% of the courses for each program can be mandatory,
whereas the rest of the courses can be chosen from other programs in the same institution or even from any program active
at the university. The role of the academic adviser is to help
the students with their choices and prevent them of making
costly mistakes that could prolong their studying. The
approval process is already done on-line [1], and the proposal
is to introduce a virtual academic adviser component that will
further ease this process by helping the majority of students,
leaving only the truly problematic to be dealt off-line.
The virtual adviser is a component that presents a visual
map of all of the previously enrolled terms and the courses
selections in each term to a student. It gives the student
measures of his success in comparison to other students. The
student can see his speed in acquiring and passing credits and
compare it with the average of his generation. Further, the
future academic terms of the student are mapped according to
his average speed and his graduation date is forecasted. The
component will enable the student to perform what-if
scenarios and change his load, change plan/program,
rearrange courses in order to come up with the best plan until
graduation.
This component will also enable future addition of
intelligent recommendation system modules that may
evaluate the capability of each student and his academic
performance parameters, compare them to a historical
database and suggest an optimally achievable adapted study
plan to the student that may lead him to faster completion
and/or higher GPA.
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