DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A WEB BASED STUDENT ACADEMIC ADVISING SYSTEM
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 INTRODUCTION
Student advising is fundamental in university education in Saudi Arabia. It aims to guide the students to get the best results and accomplish Graduate Requirements, adapt to the university environment, exploit the opportunities available to them, and providing academic skills that raise their level of education. Further it involves effective and efficient communication between the student and the advisor. It also requires considerable [1] planning on the part of both students and advisors, many universities and institutions around the world use Academic advising systems. They are helpful for both advisors and students in that they contribute to assist in making better-informed decisions and improved services.
AAS is considered Decision Support Systems (DSS) because it deals with informed cases and semi-structured decisions [2], furthermore if we considered it as a boundary object, it will fits in process more than product.
The importance of this research is to answer the question of how to build AAS successfully, due to the special nature of this system, another disciplines may be Software Engineering and Knowledge Management, because Software development of AAS is a knowledge intensive activity, an understanding from a Knowledge Management perspective offers important insights about Software Development Methodology [3] for designing and implementing AAS. Further Knowledge management has often been described as comprising [4] of three main elements: people, processes and technology, which is shown in figure 1.
Universities always look for suitable technologies for their educational process, Introducing technology to the advising process aims at leveraging repetitive tasks on software and dedicating time to helping a student plan his/her education road map. On the one hand, this view to AAS as a system could be achieved by optimizing customer interactions, and reduce operational costs. On the other hand this view will restrict the capabilities of the system itself; it will be efficient but still need to be more effective, because this system could be more interactive if we extend it to be SRMS (Student Relationship Management System) to reach maximum number of students.
2.2 OVERVIEW OF ACADEMIC ADVISING SYSTEM (ADS)
Academic advising is an important and time-consuming task and different tools and techniques can be used to make it an effective and efficient process. Most of the process, however, relies on personal interactions between students and counselors, which leads to problems such as inconsistencies among different advisors and poor utilization of resources, since very often a good portion of the advisors’ time is spent answering recurrent questions and solving trivial class scheduling problems. In response to these problems, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) has been working since 1999 on a project that supplements the conventional advising process with a Web-based advising system.
The CSE department at FAU currently has approximately 500 undergraduate Computer Science (CS) and 200 undergraduate Computer Engineering (CE) students. Advising undergraduate CS and CE students is an important and time-consuming task in the department.
Academic advising is one of the faculty’s duties and to accomplish it effectively and efficiently several different schemes have been tried in the past few years, ranging from totally distributed to totally centralized. Starting in the 1999-2000 academic year the department has decided to allocate the entire undergraduate advising load to three instructors.
Two of them share the responsibility for the CS students while the third is primarily in charge of CE students.
In addition to hiring new faculty to take charge of the undergraduate advising tasks, the department also welcomed innovative ideas that could help improving the efficiency of the advising process. One of these ideas was the creation and maintenance of a Web-based advising system for undergraduate CS and CE students, described in the remainder of this article.
This paper is organized as follows: in the next Section we briefly mention the very few projects in this area that we are aware of. Then, we present our system’s goals, followed by a general description of its features and functionality.
Specific design and implementation issues are discussed next. In a subsequent Section we provide directions for future work. Finally, we present our concluding remarks.
2.3 RELATED WORK
A recent survey performed by one of the authors concluded that there currently are very few universities in the United States with Web-based advising systems at work or under development. Most of the pages entitled Web-based advising are typically: a bulletin board with advising-related announcements, a repository of official documents in PDF or HTML format, a collection of useful links that help students get official advising-related information off the Web, or a combination of those. They do not include any scripts or CGI programs that process specific student information and produce customized advice for that particular student, the way our system does. Some of the few exceptions include:
• INSITE (INdiana Student Information Transaction Environment), by Indiana University: described as an “on-line system designed to help students and their academic advisors to review degree requirements and the student's progress towards the intended degree” [1].
In its advising module (IUCARE), students may obtain “an advising report for their current major, a different major, or a special purpose program, see how in progress courses apply to their advising report, add future courses, grades, and hours to see how they apply
to their advising report” [1].
• PLANNER Web by California State University, Monterey Bay [2].
From a commercial perspective, to our best knowledge the only product that seems to address the issue of academic advising in a way similar to our work is DegreeWorks [3] by Software Research Northwest, Inc. It is worth mentioning, however, that part of the functionality provided by DegreeWorks and INSITE (obtaining transcripts and audit reports for advising purposes) is already provided by FACTS (Florida Academic Counseling and Tracking
System) [4], a statewide Web-based system for academic advising.
2.4 GOALS AND OBJECTIVES OF ADS
The Web-based advising system’s broader goals include:
• To minimize repetitive tasks currently performed by advisors: our system aims at minimizing the amount of time and energy spent by advisors on repetitive tasks such as answering frequently asked questions in person, by phone, or email.
• To encourage students to adopt a proactive attitude towards advising-related issues: by making all the information available in one place and providing the student with tools that help answering their most frequent advising questions, it is expected that the students’ attitude towards academic advising will move from passive (“let the advisor tell me which courses I should take next”) to proactive (“let me check the system to see which courses I will be able to take next”).
• To extend the availability of official advising-related information to remote students: one of the most immediate and visible benefits of our project is to make official relevant advising information available on the Web. In addition to being accessible from anywhere, we have put our best effort to guarantee that the information is up-to-date and consistent.
• To provide academic guidance in a consistent way: by having all the reference information stored electronically in one place and using the same (set of) program(s) to advise students on which courses to take next, inconsistencies that used to occur with personal advising are minimized.
• To make advising-related information available in a single place, in electronic format: it is expected that the system be a portal for any undergraduate CSE student in need of advising-related information.
After having agreed upon these general goals, the CSE advisors and the developers of the Web-based advising system decided that the development of the system should aim at two specific objectives:
• To maintain a (set of) HTML page(s) with the most frequently asked questions (FAQs). Providing a comprehensive, well structured, up-to-date repository of FAQs allows students to find the answers to their questions in a faster and easier way. Moreover, it saves advisors’ time, reduces congestion in the advisors’ offices during peak times, encourages advisors to document the answers and post them in electronic format, allows for easier supervision of the quality of the advising process, and reduces inconsistencies and ambiguities in the process.
• To develop a set of HTML forms and related ASP (Active Server Pages) scripts that allow a student to input the courses they have taken, press a button (“Advise me”) and get a list of courses to take next.
This is the “intelligent” portion of the system: based on the user’s input (courses already taken), the degree requirements, the database of existing and available courses and their prerequisites, the system provides the student with customized advice on which classes to register for in the next term(s).
One major system design feature worth mentioning in particular is the goal to motivate students to adopt a proactive attitude toward advising-related issues. With students taking initiatives in participating actively in the academic advising, their education endeavors at FAU can become a much smoother process, resulting in a higher successful rate in achieving their education goals.