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Cyber Adviser: High-Tech, High-Touch Advising
Consequently, students may make incorrect decisions and wind up
taking courses that may not be acceptable at the university of their
choice. This results in wasted time and money. Furthermore, it is
anticipated that Florida lawmakers will no longer subsidize credit hours
beyond those needed to graduate from community colleges and public
universities. Therefore, accurate course planning becomes even more
critical.
In its move from prescriptive to developmental advising methods,
Valencia needed to switch to a new paradigm.
An alternative way was needed to make transfer manual and Valencia
catalog data available to students and advising staff. It would also be
beneficial to develop a way to present a student’s complete Valencia
course plan instead of doing the planning on a semester-by-semester
basis. This way one sees the "big picture" instead of a narrow
semester-by-semester view.
The computer is an ideal tool to store and access data and to perform
complex computations. This is where Cyber Adviser comes into the act.
How Cyber Adviser Works
Transfer manual data is interpreted by experienced advisers and
collected in files that allow rapid access to that data. Valencia’s course
descriptions are also stored in a file format that allows instant display of
every course description as it appears in the catalog. This eliminates the
need to constantly search printed data to develop course plans.
The current Cyber Adviser data was extracted from the Valencia catalog
and Florida state university transfer manuals. Algorithms were designed
to rapidly access data according to a user’s needs. For example, there are
886 course descriptions in the current Valencia catalog and Cyber
Adviser is able to instantly display any of them by merely clicking on its
course number. At the same time, the program can extract a course’s
credit hours and prerequisites (if any). This ability alone eliminates the
time previously needed to search the catalog for this information.
Cyber Adviser aids course planning for students having these
educational goals: those wishing to continue their education at a
university after graduating from Valencia (Associate in Arts (A.A.)
degree); and those wanting to enter the work force after graduating from
Valencia (Associate in Science (A.S.) degree).
The program performs four steps:
1.Checks entrance requirements;
2.Automatically recommends courses to be taken at the
community-college level;
3.Automatically designs a curriculum that can be manually
modified; and
4.Automatically plans a student’s course sequence for up to three
years.
