PAWS Meeting 2006-11-20

1. Sharon presented the following papers from ELeran 2006 related to student advising. Both papers were from the same group at California State University, Dominguez Hills.
   1. Intelligent On-line Advising with Expert System Shell
      This paper discusses the reason for having an automated advising system and what the system needs to offer. Partly it describes the requirement related to specific design of the study program at Cal State. The system uses an expert system shell to provide advice to the students. It allows conversation with students leading to an advice. The system has been weakly evaluated over one semester by only asking the students to play with it.
   2. Student Advising SystemThis paper describes the process which is required to provide an advice to a student for taking a course. It describes what factors needs to be considered such as pre-requisites, co-requisites, indirect-requisite, importance of the course, ... . The current version of the system described in this papers requires manual work of the students.
      

      We discussed implementing some of the ideas discussed in this paper in CourseAgent. Specially since currently CourseAgent lacks the consideration of the requirements. Peter mentioned the idea of providing personalized requirements for the students based on their preferences and for example planned courses

      
      
2. Danielle presented a paper from IADIS International Conference on WWW/Internet 2005 titled An Integrative Model on Web User Experience.

   The paper describes a methodology for measuring the effectiveness of interactive systems such as adaptive systems based on "Technology Acceptance Model". It also provides an example of evaluation of an interactive system.

   Sergey suggested that given the data collected over the last semesters through the questionnaires, Danielle can try some of the ideas suggested in this paper.