Abstract
Abstract Prior to every academic semester, every department's administrator is required to offer the best overall set of courses to meet student requirements, instructor needs and department regulations. The key contributions of this research is firstly, determining the potential factors that influence student behavior on the online courses they choose, secondly, modeling the course offering problem and fitting a function to a training set of data using neural network approach, thirdly, design and implementation of a decision support system to help the department's administrator to simulate student behavior in course selection process and support his/her decisions on the courses to be offered, and lastly, employing the proposed decision support system to perform what-if analysis and goal seeking behavior. The samples of the experiments came from 298 online graduate courses in 14 academic terms from 2005 to 2011. The results revealed high prediction accuracy on the experimental data. The performance of the...
Highlights
In today's world, every day we are faced with situations where we need to make a decision
The course offering problem was introduced as a complex and unstructured one which plays a critical role in student satisfaction with elearning
The Decision Support System (DSS) was comprised of three main components: firstly, data came from 298 online graduate courses and was managed by Microsoft SQL Server 2008; secondly, a predictive model developed through MATLAB R2010b neural network toolbox; lastly, a graphical user interface implemented using MATLAB R2010b graphical user interface development environment (GUIDE)
Summary
In today's world, every day we are faced with situations where we need to make a decision. It can be a minor and routine one such as choosing what to make for dinner or what to wear for work. Sometimes we are required to make major and difficult decisions which have large, longterm consequences and can alter the course of our life path such as academic major or career choice. Modern computerized systems have capabilities that can facilitate human decision making in a number of ways, including; speedy computations, improved communication and collaboration, increased productivity of group members, improved data management, overcoming cognitive limits in processing and storing information, quality support, agility support, using the Web, and anywhere and anytime support 47.
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