Session S3C DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A WEB-BASED ACADEMIC ADVISING SYSTEM Oge Marques1, Xundong Ding2, and Sam Hsu3 Abstract Academic advising is an important and timeconsuming task and different tools and techniques can be used to make it an effective and efficient process. This paper describes the design and development of a Web-based advising system that supplements the conventional advising process. The system’s goals include: to minimize repetitive tasks performed by advisors, to encourage students to adopt a proactive attitude towards advising, to make advisingrelated information available to remote students in a single place, in electronic format, and to minimize inconsistencies in the advising process. The system supports three different types of users (students, advisors, and secretaries), each of which has different privileges and allowed operations. Student users may use the system to find relevant advisingrelated information, such as course descriptions and advising FAQs. They can also ask the system which course(s) to take next, based on the classes they have already taken. Index Terms Academic advising, Proactive advising, Undergraduate counseling, Web-based advising.
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 19992000 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.
MOTIVATION
RELATED WORK
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
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-
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Oge Marques, Florida Atlantic University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton, FL 33431-0991
[email protected] 2 Xundong Ding, Florida Atlantic University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton, FL 33431-0991
[email protected] 3 Sam Hsu, Florida Atlantic University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton, FL 33431-0991
[email protected]
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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.
GOALS AND OBJECTIVES Our 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.
OVERALL DESCRIPTION OF THE SYSTEM The system’s framework basically consists of a main page (Figure 1) – from which all the options are accessible – and a set of supporting HTML pages, forms, and ASP scripts.
FIGURE. 1 WEB-BASED ADVISING SYSTEM’S MAIN PAGE.
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Session S3C The main page has links to each major’s degree requirements and career guide, other advising-related information of interest, the FAQ page, and the forms to input course information and get customized advice on next courses to take. The system supports three different types of users: • student users: who will use the system to get academic advising, • faculty users (advisors): who will post, update, and manage information used by the FAQ subsystem, and • administrative users (secretaries): who will access, update, and manage information used by the “next courses to take” subsystem.
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two fields to record who did the last update and when.
Advisors can add, delete, or update questions using a friendly front-end (Figure 3). When editing an FAQ (Figure 4), advisors can format the answers in HTML or use plain text. Students check the advising FAQs by clicking on a hyperlink in the advising home page. If they do not find the answer to their questions, they can press a button that will open an email gateway that allows them to email the question to their advisors right away.
Each different type of user has a different GUI, a set of privileges/rights, and a set of possible actions. Access to classified or sensitive information (maintained by faculty and/or administrative users) is password-protected. This relationship is illustrated in Figure 2. The FAQ subsystem The advising FAQ page is generated on the fly by an ASP script that extracts information from a database of FAQs created and maintained by the advisors. Advising questions are divided in three types or categories: general, CS-specific, or CE-specific. Each record in the database contains: • a number (key) to uniquely identify it, • the question’s type or category, • the question itself, • its answer, and
Faculty/Advisor
Password Checking
FIGURE. 3 FAQ MAINTENANCE FRONT-END: ADVISORS CAN ADD NEW QUESTIONS OR SELECT AN EXISTING QUESTION TO BE DELETED / UPDATED.
GUI
add/delete/update FAQ
view
Secretary
Password Checking
GUI
add/delete/update
Courses
get advised Student
GUI
view FAQ
FIGURE. 2 DIFFERENT USERS AND THEIR POSSIBLE ACTIONS.
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Session S3C the base course and a course to which the base course is a prerequisite. The “next course to take” subsystem reads info from the course database, builds a directed graph based on course prerequisite information and performs topological sorting on the resulting graph. Our system runs on a Windows NT machine with IIS server. The database management system of choice was Microsoft Access and the scripts were written in ASP.
FIGURE. 4 FAQ UPDATING.
The “next courses to take” subsystem This is the core component of the Web-based advising system. It consists of a set of forms and ASP scripts that allow the students to input information on the courses they have already taken using a friendly GUI and get advice on which courses to take next. Students can input information on the courses they have already taken using a friendly GUI that resembles the worksheets used by CSE advisors (Figure 5) and press the “Advise me” button to get advice on which courses to take next. There are three types of worksheets per major: one for four-year students, one for transfer students, and one for second bachelor students. The ASP script associated with each form reads the information input to the system, compares it against the degree requirements for the specific major and student type, and returns a list of courses to take next, based on their prerequisites and availability (Figure 6).
FIGURE. 5 HTML FORM FOR COMPUTER ENGINEERING SECOND BACHELOR STUDENTS.
DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES The back-end of the system consists of two main databases, one for the FAQ subsystem (FAQ) and one for the “next course to take” subsystem (course). Each record in the FAQ database contains: the question’s type (general, CS-specific, or CE-specific), the question itself (in plain text), its answer (in HTML), and two fields to record who did the last update and when. There are two tables in the course database, CourseInfo and Prerequisite. • Table CourseInfo contains records of the courses, where each record includes the course’s prefix and number (e.g., COT4420), its name (e.g., “Formal languages and automata theory”), number of credithours (e.g., 3) and its type (core course or elective). • Table Prerequisite contains records of the prerequisites, where each record contains two fields:
FIGURE. 6 LIST OF COURSES PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THE “NEXT COURSES TO TAKE” SUBSYSTEM.
CONCLUSIONS We have designed and developed a Web-based academic advising system to supplement the conventional advising process. Major benefits brought by this system include:
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Availability of accessing official advising information from any place, using a Web browser. Ability to quickly find answers to most common advising questions. Reduction in the amount of time and energy spent by advisors on repetitive tasks. Reduction of inconsistencies, omissions, and ambiguities, in the advising rules and procedures. Reduction of traffic in advisors’ offices during critical periods (e.g., (advance) registration). Concentration of relevant advising information, in electronic format, in a single place.
A prototype of the proposed system has been established and currently in the dry run stage. Initial feedbacks from users have been positive and encouraging. The system will undergo a field trial this Summer, after which it will be reviewed, validated, and put to use by all the undergraduate CSE students We will continue working on the improvement of the system to make it an integral part of our academic environment for the benefits of our students and the faculty as well.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work was partially supported by CAPES (Brasília – Brazil).
REFERENCES [1] INSITE home page, Indiana University. http://insite.indiana.edu/ [2] PLANNER Web home page, California State University, Monterey Bay. http://infoserver.monterey.edu/#PLANNER [3] DegreeWorks home page. http://demo.srn.com/Demo_DegreeWorks.shtml [4] FACTS home page. http://www.facts.org/
FUTURE WORK Future versions of the system might incorporate the following improvements: • Integration of the Web-based advising system with FACTS databases, allowing automatic extraction of information on which courses the student has already taken. • Allowing students and advisors to obtain highlighted and/or reformatted versions of the FACTS audit report (e.g., with different colors for requirements that have or have not been met, a summary of pending requirements, etc.). • Allowing advisors to obtain a reduced version of the FACTS audit report (with pending requirements only) that could be used for graduation check purposes. • Handling several special cases in advising students such as: • Alerts on courses that are not offered every semester • Changes in courses’ names, codes, prerequisites, number of credits, or contents, among others • Alerts on courses that must be taken during/before/after a particular semester in the program • Information on which courses are acceptable as Technical Electives
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