Abstract
Student advising services are often regarded as the mainstream vehicle for promoting relationships, understanding, and performance in academic institutions especially at the tertiary level. However, it is often fraught with challenges in developing countries in respect of insufficient supporting manpower and attendant high cost of running effective services. In institutions where the services exist, not all students benefit from it as a result of some factors such as: the sub-optimal performance of the advising personnel; negative psychological complex in students arising from unusual egocentrism (especially in those students who are regarded as “low performers” and would prefer not to be openly confronted); handicapped students especially those students with visible handicaps e.g. speech problems, etc. This paper is the first part of a study aimed at creating a balance in the foregoing situations by presenting a design of a faceless automated “<i>AdvisorBot</i>” based on the bot framework. The design reflects a virtual support system model which could be adopted to enhance student support and course advising efficiency. Analysis of the existing system in most tertiary institutions in Nigeria reveals that student support services actually exist though not efficient in the sense that there are seldom specialized units/departments dedicated to this function in majority of the Institutions especially the public institutions where student advising is the work of academic staff in the various departments. The design follows a mix of the agent and object-oriented approaches and produces an implementation-ready specification whose full implementation would effectively support students during their studies. The system facilitates the process of advising by providing quick and easy access to valuable information, and giving important feedback on several issues involved in student advisement, which otherwise would take considerable time.
Highlights
Academic advising is an important function of any academic institution
The aim of this paper is to evaluate the existing academic advising process(es) in tertiary institutions in Nigeria in a view to improving the existing system through a properly conceived Intelligent Bot that offers real-time decision support irrespective of the location and disposition of the student/user
The global awareness on robots and the paradigm shift towards the construction of artificially intelligent ChatBots suggest a future of a personalized fluid user experience wherein intelligent systems would perform at a level similar or comparable to humans in interactive messaging
Summary
Academic advising is an important function of any academic institution. Appropriate advising and counselling of students increases their chances of success. Academic advising is often arrogated to human trained in the field of counseling and career development This is usually the reason behind the establishment of separate and functional academic advisory and student support units or department in some colleges and universities. According to [2] academic advising is effective academic when it directs students to explore and define their own purpose, goals, and curricular pathways to achieve learning and developmental outcomes. For such effectiveness to be realized, it behoves the institution to ensure that its curricular plans are coherent, and provides satisfactory programs of study that enhance students’ educational goals, career and life aspirations
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