Online Course Registration and Advisory Systems Based on Students’ Personal and Social Constraints

Bamo Nadir Faraj; Aree Ali Muhammed

doi:10.24017/science.2021.2.8

Authors

Bamo Nadir Faraj Komar University of Science and Technology
Aree Ali Muhammed Komar University of Science and Technology http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1538-2331

Abstract

Komar University of Science and Technology (KUST) is among very few universities in Iraq that follows the prerequisite system which is very common in the tertiary level institutions around the world. In such kinds of systems, the prerequisites represent a one or set of courses a student must have completed in order to be able to enrol on a specific course. Although these kinds of systems give total freedom to students on when and how they are going to take courses, deciding which course to take that serves in the best interest of the student is very challenging and sometimes time consuming.
This paper presents a web based system developed and implemented by KUST facilitating course registration for the students and administrative staff such that the best possible schedule and course/section combination is presented to the students considering their personal constraints and course requirements. To assist students to make proper decisions the system provides them with collected and analyzed historical data about each offered course such as passing rate of the course, the number of selected friends who registered for and marked the course as favorite and how many courses the selected course is prerequisite of. The collected data is gathered from the currently in place database containing course registration data since spring 2016 which is believed to be adequate to produce accurate results.
The system also has the role of academic advisor, which plays an important role in the students’ academic life. Since traditional advising requires extra effort, times and sometimes the suggestion that comes from an academic advisor might not be in the best interest of students due to the lack of information about the student’s academic background or not having sufficient time advising a large number of students in a short window of registration period.

Keywords:

Online Course Registration System, Academic Advisory System, Individualized recommendation

Author Biography

Aree Ali Muhammed, Komar University of Science and Technology

Faculty Member in Computer Engineering department at Komar University of Science and Technology

References

[1] D. K. Hatch and C. E. Garcia, Academic advising and the persistence intentions of community college students in their first weeks in college, vol. 40, no. 3. 2017.
https://doi.org/10.1353/rhe.2017.0012
[2] S. J. Schmidt, "The importance of friendships for academic success," J. Food Sci. Educ., vol. 19, no. 1, pp.2-5, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1541-4329.12176
[3] S. Chung, R. B. Lount, H. M. Park, and E. S. Park, "Friends With Performance Benefits: A Meta-Analysis on the Relationship Between Friendship and Group Performance," Personal. Soc. Psychol. Bull., vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 63-79, 2018.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167217733069
[4] J. Flashman, "Academic achievement and its impact on friend dynamics," Sociol. Educ., vol. 85, no. 1, pp.61-80, 2012.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0038040711417014
[5] "KUST Interactive Flowchart." [Online]. Available: http://flowchart.komar.edu.iq/. [Accessed: 28-Apr2021].
[6] R. Morsomme and S. V. Alferez, "Content-based course recommender system for liberal arts education," EDM 2019 - Proc. 12th Int. Conf. Educ. Data Min., no. Edm, pp. 748-753, 2019.
[7] E. Hart-Baldridge, "Faculty Advisor Perspectives of Academic Advising," NACADA J., vol. 40, no. 1, pp.10-22, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.12930/NACADA-18-25
[8] M. N. Esraa Afify, "A Proposed Model for a Web-Based Academic Advising System," (International J. Adv. Netw. Appl. (IJANA, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 3345-3361, 2017.
[9] L. Keston and W. Goodridge, "AdviseMe: An Intelligent Web-Based Application for Academic Advising," Int. J. Adv. Comput. Sci. Appl., vol. 6, no. 8, 2015.
https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2015.060831
[10] R. S. Abdulwahhab, H. S. Al Makhmari, and S. N. Al Battashi, "An educational web application for academic advising," 2015 IEEE 8th GCC Conf. Exhib. GCCCE 2015, no. March, 2015.
https://doi.org/10.1109/IEEEGCC.2015.7060084
[11] O. Alhabashneh, "Fuzzy-based adaptive framework for module advising expert system," Ann. Emerg. Technol. Comput., vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 13-27, 2021.
https://doi.org/10.33166/AETiC.2021.01.002
[12] N. B. Salehudin, H. Kahtan, H. Al-bashiri, and M. A. Abdulgabber, "A proposed course recommender model based on collaborative filtering for course registration," Int. J. Adv. Comput. Sci. Appl., vol. 10, no. 11, pp. 162-168, 2019.
https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0101122
[13] A. Bozyigit, F. Bozyigit, D. Kilinc, and E. Nasiboglu, "Collaborative filtering based course recommender using OWA operators," SIIE 2018 - 2018 Int. Symp. Comput. Educ. Proc., 2018.
https://doi.org/10.1109/SIIE.2018.8586681
[14] V. Vaidhehi and R. Suchithra, "An enhanced approach using collaborative filtering for generating under graduate program recommendations," 2019 2nd Int. Conf. Adv. Comput. Commun. Paradig. ICACCP 2019,pp. 1-6, 2019.
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICACCP.2019.8882939
[15] E. S. Khorasani, Z. Zhenge, and J. Champaign, "A Markov chain collaborative filtering model for course enrollment recommendations," Proc. - 2016 IEEE Int. Conf. Big Data, Big Data 2016, pp. 3484-3490, 2016.
https://doi.org/10.1109/BigData.2016.7841011
[16] S. Channarukul, N. Saejiem, K. Bhumichitr, R. Jiamthapthaksin, V. Nicklamai, and K. Terdvikran, "Socialaware automated course planner: An integrated recommender system for university registration system," ECTI-CON 2017 - 2017 14th Int. Conf. Electr. Eng. Comput. Telecommun. Inf. Technol., pp. 545-548, 2017.
https://doi.org/10.1109/ECTICon.2017.8096295
[17] J. Xu, T. Xing, and M. Van Der Schaar, "Personalized Course Sequence Recommendations," IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 64, no. 20, pp. 5340-5352, 2016.
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSP.2016.2595495
[18] S. Zhang, L. Yao, A. Sun, and Y. Tay, "Deep learning based recommender system: A survey and new perspectives," ACM Comput. Surv., vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 1-35, 2019.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3285029
[19] T. Downey, "Spring Framework," 2021. [Online]. Available: https://start.spring.io/. [Accessed: 29-Apr2021].
[20] "MySQL." [Online]. Available: https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/installer/. [Accessed: 27-Apr-2021].
[21] "VueJS JavaScript Framework." [Online]. Available: https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/installation.html#NPM. [Accessed: 27-Apr-2021].
[22] A. Assiri, A. A. M. Al-Ghamdi, and H. Brdesee, "From traditional to intelligent academic advising: A systematic literature review of e-academic advising," Int. J. Adv. Comput. Sci. Appl., vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 507-517, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2020.0110467
[23] E. Nwelih and S. Chiemeke, "Framework for a web-based spatial decision supportsystem for academic advising," African Journal of Computing and ICT, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 121-126, 2012
[24] M. Talal Al-Nory, "Simple decision support tool for university academic advising," Proc. 2012 Int. Symp. Inf. Technol. Med. Educ. ITME 2012, vol. 1, pp. 53-57, 2012
https://doi.org/10.1109/ITiME.2012.6291245
[25] J. Eckroth and R. Anderson, 'Tarot: a course advising system for the future', Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, vol. 34, no. 3, Jan. 2019, Accessed: Aug. 16, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.5555/3306465.3306481