Rule-based expert systems for supporting university students

There are more than 15 million college students in the US alone. Academic advising for courses and scholarships is typically performed by human advisors, bringing an immense managerial workload to faculty members, as well as other staff at universities. This paper reports and discusses the development of two educational expert systems at a private international university. The first expert system is a course advising system which recommends courses to undergraduate students. The second system suggests scholarships to undergraduate students based on their eligibility. While there have been reported systems for course advising, the literature does not seem to contain any references to expert systems for scholarship recommendation and eligibility checking. Therefore the scholarship recommender that we developed is first of its kind. Both systems have been implemented and tested using Oracle Policy Automation (OPA) software. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.