November 1996 — Features

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Cyber Adviser: High-Tech, High-Touch Advising

Accessibility: The program could be freely distributed to students who own PCs or be made accessible from anywhere by anyone who has Internet access. Department Course Predictions: By using the resulting course plans for each student, it is conceivable that department chairs could predict course demands for the different campuses by relating anticipated course requests and student zip codes. In order for this to have significant value, however, almost the whole student body would need to use Cyber Adviser. Adaptability: Cyber Adviser was designed to work in a format that meets the needs of a community college. However, the algorithms and features are readily adaptable to developing similar computer programs for four-year colleges and universities. Stan Lieberman, Analyst-Programmer, develops computer applications that are "remarkably" user friendly. He has been programming with Visual Basic for four years and has a B.S. (Physics) from City College of New York. E-mail: slieberman@worldnet.att.net Technical Stuff: Cyber Adviser was developed with Microsoft Visual Basic 3.0 on Windows for Workgroups. The program can be used on stand-alone PC or put on a network. The program fits on one 3.5" HD floppy in compressed format. Installed configuration requires only 1.8MB of hard disk space. The minimum recommended computer is a 486 running at least 75MHz and having 8MB of RAM. I have run it on a 386SX at 16MHz and 4MB of RAM. It seemed stable, but very slow. Program Demo: To see Cyber Adviser in action, a demo disk is available by sending your request and $4 (S&H) to the author at P.O. Box 533111, Orlando, FL 32853. Products mentioned in this article: Visual Basic 3.0; Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA, (800) 426-9400, www.microsoft.com