Designing and exploring study field recommender system for prospective students

Lately, the number of Study Programs (SPs) in higher education has increased notably and became more closely related to each other. This leaves prospective students to find their desired SP within a wide range of available SPs. Ultimately some of the students end up with an ambiguous variety to choose from. In this study, we developed a Study Field Recommender System for Prospective Students (SFRecSysPS). The system uses school results, students' school/home activities and academic itinerary interests as inputs to recommend an appropriate study field. To achieve this, the inputs into SFRecSysPS system were entered in the form of questionnaires which were later analysed and computed. A total of 210 prospective students from four High Schools in a Tshwane area (South Africa) were randomly given unstructured questionnaires to complete. Our system yielded 96% successful recommendations and 4% yielded no recommendations.