Abstract:

Academic advising is one of the most important processes in universities and academic institutions. It is an essential component of a successful academic experience in which the student (a) completes the degree requirements in the recommended program period, (b) aligns her time, intellectual and financial resources with a chosen study plan, and (c) acquires the required skills for her future goals. Each student is required to meet with the advisor at least twice in each academic semester; however, most of the advisors’ time is spend on answering recurrent questions and solving trivial class scheduling problems which leads to problems such as inconsistencies among different advisors and poor utilization of resources. In small institutions, another issue needs to be considered that is the number of students in each class to guarantee a minimum number of enrolled students. The academic advising process requires considerable planning on the part of both students and advisors. Both the student and the advisor are required to have good amount of knowledge on degree requirements, study plans, school bylaws to complete the advising tasks. Academic advisors also need to work with multiple advising documents in one time such as student transcript, student study plan, and course offerings. With the advancements in technology and the inclusion of it in assisting most of the academic institution processes, the academic advisors and the students are exposed to a variety of opportunities, enhancements, problems, and choices. Almost all universities and academic institutions around the world use some type automated advising systems. They are advantageous in that they contribute to assisting in making better-informed decisions and improved services. Introducing technology to the advising process aims at throwing repetitive tasks on software and dedicating time to helping a student plan his/her education road map. The main objective of developing the system is to aid the advisors in preparing pre-registration plans for students and the department in projecting the demand on each course and making decision on which courses should be offered each semester such that the resources are optimally allocated. The proposed solution is a spreadsheet-based decision support tool to provide functions for the repetitive tasks. The system also aims to semi-automate the decision-making process and solves decision problems taken by the department. It would enable to enter student information efficiently and easily. Macros and simple click buttons, coded using VBA, are added to display results and such. The tool gives summarized information to aid in offering courses every semester. It allows making calculations for decision-making, for example calculating the GPA, credits completed, courses left, number of pre-registered students for each course, etc. Designing an Excel-based DSS and combining it with VBA is the appropriate solution because Excel provides a great variety of functions for decision-making in a much easy-to-use way. We have designed and developed a decision support tool to supplement the conventional advising process. The proposed tool aids the advisors in preparing pre-registration plans for students and the department in projecting the demand on each course. The tool supports the strategic decisions on which courses should be offered each semester such that the resources are optimally allocated.