Student Dashboard for a Multi-agent Approach for Academic Advising

• DOI: 10.18260/p.27346
• Publication Date: 2016-07-07T17:00:30Z
• Authors: Oscar Perez; Virgilio Gonzalez
• Keywords: Diversity; 0502 economics and business; 05 social sciences

The objective of this research is to demonstrate a mechanism to improve the advising of students in a nontraditional environment. Minority serving institutions, commuter campus and institutions with a high percentage of student transfers are unable to keep a tightly controlled cohort of students progressing through the curriculum. Students usually have varied course loads and different priorities due to family, financial need or other responsibilities. Therefore, they need an individualized approach to advising. The school administration faces more challenges scheduling courses and allocating diminishing resources to satisfy the student demand. In addition, the faculty needs to assess the efficacy of the curriculum in a program and collecting longitudinal student data is difficult. A web application (mobile compatible) of a multi-agent approach to allow the students to take more control over their individualized advising has been developed. In this context, the student tool becomes an agent and the school provides the environment with a desirable behavior for the system. We call the academic control objective the "Operator." This paper focuses on the agent system by building a dashboard tool that will collect students' information about their progress through the curriculum in a program and will generate advising recommendations. The agent logic employs principles used in project management tools designed to help the students optimize their resources to complete their degree sooner. It provides a visualization map of course sequences, customized for each student based on the course history, making advising adjustments that will optimize the time to obtain the degree under a constrained set of resources. At the same time, the agent system provides real-time feedback to the Operator. The second tool is the Operator dashboard that consolidates the collected data from the agents through several semesters (historical data) plus the predicted effects of the recommended plans. This enables a better resource allocation ...