Intelligent On-line Advising with Expert System Shell Kazimierz

Intelligent On-line Advising with Expert System Shell Kazimierz Kowalski (CS, California State Univ. ) Mahabub Alam (CS, California State Univ. ) Jozef Goetz (Math/Physics/CS, Univ. of La Verne) Presented by Sharon HSIAO Nov. 2006

agenda l l l Introduction/motivation Expert systems in student advising Advising process, advising system Designing the system with Exsys CORVID conclusion

The NEED for an automated system l l Lot of transfer students Student’s availability is limited Many new faculty members Online education

Constraints of Selecting classes l l Course prerequisites Actual class openings Degree check requirements Student’s availability

Expert Systems in Student Advising l Early 90 s. l l PC-based expert system, Industrial and System Engineering Dept. Ohio University Similar approach, but in LISP. California State University Dominguez Hills La Crosse VP-Expert expert system shell, University of Wisconsin Exsys expert system shell, CS dept. California State University Dominguez Hills

Online advising systems l Implementation techniques l l Client-side scripting: javascript Server-side scripting: active server pages l l Applet: Java l l Web-based interactive student advisement(Tang, Fluker&Zeng, 1999) Michigan Technology univ. (Morrison, 2003), Duisburgh Univ. (Werner, at al. 2003), e. Advisor Univ. North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Scotts, 2003) Expert systems shells Exsys Corvid (Awad, 2002) Complex expert systems techniques to deliver highly effective expert knowledge l Giving students advice online through expert systems

Advising Process l l l Degree check requirements Student special interests Structured degree programs Less rigid programs Taking the course which is the prerequisite for largest number of other courses guarantees the shortest study time

Advising System Goal: automate the student advising process in General Studies Program Names of departments involved in selected courses within sections Has to satisfy the number of units required for sections and categories Has to satisfy constraints related to the number of departments involved Student’s interests, student’s availability

Designing the System with Exsys CORVID l l Conversation in decision-making process within webpage Inference engine: analyze and combine individual rules to solve larger problems, to determine what possible answers

Exsys CORVID l Example rule: Which of the following social science courses have you completed so far? Then: [SS] is giving the value [SS]+3 And [FLAG 6] is given the value 1 Eg. POL_100&GEO_100 Student’s availability? Interests?

conclusion l l Has been tested for 1 semester, 18 qualifiers, 64 choices(courses), 16 numeric variables, 243 rules Possibilities: play it real!

Thank you! Please comment!

WERNER, S. , HUNGER, A. , SCHWARZ, F. &BUZUK, S. (2003) CONGA: A Course Online/Offline Information and Guidance System to support an International Degree Course, Proceedings of ICCE 99, Chiba, Japan, 577 -583 Hsu, S. , Marques, O. , Ilyas, M. &Ding, X. (2002) Web-based undergraduate academic advising system, international conference on engineering education, Manchester, UK, 1 -6 u“PLANNER WEB”, California State University, Monterey Bay http: //infoserver. csumb. edu/#planner u“Advising Central”, North Carolina University, http: //www. ncsu. edu/advising_central/advisers/preprof. html