Abstract
Writing study regulations for academic study programs and automatically implementing those regulations is a difficult task that involves a variety of actors and requires at each step careful compliance to the constraints defined in the regulations. This paper describes: (1) the innovation process, taking place through a hands-on experiment, that lead the R&D Unit of the University of Geneva to provide a proposal for a digital service targeting the above purpose; (2) the actual design of such a digital service, providing various functionalities: (a) the elaboration of study regulations; (b) the elaboration of the corresponding study plan; (c) the actual implementation of the study plan through the information system. The digital service relies on two main ideas: (1) all study regulations and study plans are built from common atomic elements, that we call building blocks; (2) ensuring compliance to various constraints is achieved through a reasoning engine capturing the constraints defined over an ontology of the study regulations domain. Each year, for a given University, several study regulations, with various constraints and structure are defined or updated. They all need to be carefully crafted and implemented. The work presented in this paper has the potential to alleviate and improve this task for the various actors involved (students, program directors, lawyers, scientific committee members, study advisor, information systems managers, students’ office).
Highlights
Study regulations are an important element that define the student journey and give the basis for a maximal student experience
Identifying the building blocks of both a study regulation and a study plan Identifying the various functionalities to develop in order to obtain a complete service
Visual digital services are useful; Three services are needed to support the different steps of the process: (1) writing study regulations, (2) setting up study plans, and (3) defining own personalised program; Study regulations can be captured by constraints in the ontology (Table 2)
Summary
Study regulations are an important element that define the student journey and give the basis for a maximal student experience. Establishing and enforcing a study regulation encompass several steps, such as: (1) the actual writing of the study regulation - a legal document that has to be coherently written, in line with University templates, and approved by the legal department of the University; (2) establishing a study plan, i.e. the actual choice of courses that constitute the program, in such a manner that it is in line with its corresponding study regulation; (3) implementing the study regulation within a digital service compliant with the study regulation This means - among others - that for each student enrolled in the corresponding program, the digital service automatically provides the ECTS for successfully passed courses, identifies whether the student has reached a step in the program (e.g successfully passed the first year), and more generally verifies a series of conditions related to success, failure, or elimination. Section highlights the strategic positioning of this project within the current information systems portfolio of Unige, and Section concludes the paper
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