Associate-Degree-Plan scheduling and Recommendation system for Virtual Academic Advisor system

Abstract

Community college students come from diverse backgrounds and experience levels. They begin their education path pursuing a degree in a major of their choice. Most students aim to get transferred to certain universities, an academic path that demands to fulfill specific requirements, which makes students eligible for the transfer. Academic advisors at community colleges help students in creating academic plans trying their best to incorporate students’ interests, life constraints, and background. Being a heavily manual process that demands experience and familiarity with the process, there is a clear need to automate this process.The Virtual Academic Advisor (VAA) system aims to address the problem of automating academic plan creation for community colleges. The VAA is a research project paired with the development of an interactive software system that supports creating and displaying academic plans based on the needs and preferences of students. Work previously done by various students, focused on automated recommendation of core courses for targeted majors. However, no research or development has been done to incorporate selection of elective-course choices when generating an academic plan, nor a clear strategy on how to integrate elective-recommendation with the VAA system has been outlined. Incorporating electives opens up a whole new research aspect of automated scheduling. Furthermore, elective-course selection is crucial for scheduling associate degrees plans. Associate degrees are offered by community colleges and students can earn such a degree before/without getting transferred to a university. In this thesis, we incorporate the logic and functionality of scheduling elective courses along with the core courses to generate associate degree schedules for the intended major and university of the student. We gather and collect the necessary data for the elective courses and test our scheduler for the associate degree schedules. This project also addresses the research and implementation necessary to generate alternative-schedule recommendations and its integration with the VAA system using APIs. This will assist students in exploring alternate academic paths.