Design and development of a Web-based academic advising system

Academic advising is an important and time-consuming task and different tools and techniques can be used to make it an effective and efficient process. This paper describes the design and development of a Web-based advising system that supplements the conventional advising process. The system's goals include: to minimize repetitive tasks performed by advisors, to encourage students to adopt a proactive attitude towards advising, to make advising-related information available to remote students in a single place, in electronic format, and to minimize inconsistencies in the advising process. The system supports three different types of users (students, advisors, and secretaries), each of which has different privileges and allowed operations. Student users may use the system to find relevant advising-related information, such as course descriptions and advising FAQs. They can also ask the system which course(s) to take next, based on the classes they have already taken.