I.

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POSSIBLE TITLE A WEB BASED ADVISING TOOL FOR ACADEMIC ADVISORS AND STUDENTS FOR DOSCST WEB-BASED ADVISING SYSTEM FOR DOSCST A WEB-BASED DECISION SUPPORT TOOL FOR ACADEMIC ADVISING

II. PROPONENTS y Bacunlay, Ronald y Madanlo, Kristi y Respicio, Emilio Jr. III. RATIONALE Davao Oriental State College of Science and Technology is currently using the ESMS for its enrollment system and advising subjects for students is just part of this system. The main objective of academic advising is to guide, motivate and support students to explore their potentials and make precise academic choices in order to satisfy the students' needs and comply with academic policies. To achieve these objectives, DOSCST employs the direct communication between advisors and students as the main advising system. Advisors are typically faculty or professional advisors employedby an academic unit. A normal advising session consists of meetings between an advisor and a student. On the basis of these meetings, the student makes decisions about class schedules, choosing an academic major or minor, and many other academic related activities. These important decisions are made based on the information about previously completed courses, degree requirements, academic policies, and other courses in the upcoming semester provided by advisors balanced against the student's work schedule and other interests or commitments.

The current academic advising system, however, has encountered some problems. Among other issues, there are some noticeable points. First, since the academic advisors are major and comprehensive resources for students to utilize, they need to spend time understanding and updating their knowledge about degree requirements and academic policies as well as familiarizing themselves with students' progress toward academic degrees prior to any advising period. This is a time-consuming task for any advisor especially when

students far outnumber the advisors. Second, a faculty advisor may have several duties during an advising period adding to the difficulties in their other responsibilities. Third, most of the time, advisors answer repeated questions about trivial class scheduling.This situation can lead to inconsistent information among advisors. In fact, these questions could be answered easily by students themselves, if useful information about class schedules and previously completed courses is available and easy to access. Accordingly, there should be a tool for helping students to take advantage of authorized part of academic information before coming to their advisors. Finally, quite frequently, computer-literate students would like to have more electronic interaction for advising. This is an important factor that needs to be taken into consideration because the students are customers of the services both directly and indirectly. Although there are some problems in the current advising system, faculty mentors or advisors cannot be replaced completely by a computer-based system. The reason is that the academic advising process requires the professional knowledge of academic disciplines to satisfy questions about a specific course structure, and etc. Moreover, the students do not only come to the advisors' offices for course selection. IV. PROBLEMS y Laborious task for the students and advisorsduring enrollment period. Students and advisors have hard time during advising period since the process that is used in advising during enrollment is paper-based which means that the students and adviser needs to see each other during enrollment. Difficulty in retrieving information. Students retrieve their files in an envelope kept by the department during enrollment. This means that they dont have an access to their grades and to the subjects that they already took up when the enrollment period ends. Keeping track of students information is inconvenient in the side of the advisor. The fact that the advisors handle many students during advising is already inconvenient for them to keep track of the students individual information. It would require much of their time to keep track of each student records during enrollment which sometimes leads to inconsistency in advising subjects.

V.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION OBJECTIVES General Objectives: The General objective of the study is to develop a Web-based Advising System for Davao Oriental State College of Science and Technology witha clientserver architecture. Moreover, it will assist advisors and students make better use of an already present electronic student management system. Specifically, the proposed study aims to develop a system:

To minimize repetitive tasks currently performed by advisors: the system aims at minimizing the amount of time and energy spent by advisors on repetitive tasks such as answering frequently asked questions in person, by phone, or email. To encourage students to adopt a practical attitude towards advising-related issues: by making all the information available in one place and providing the student with tools that help answering their most frequent advising questions, it is expected that the students attitude towards academic advising will move from passive (let the advisor tell me which courses I should take next) to proactive (let me check the system to see which courses I will be able to take next). To extend the availability of official advising-related information to remote students: one of the mostimmediate and visible benefits of our project is to makeofficial relevant advising information available on the Web. In addition to being accessible from anywhere, we have put our best effort to guarantee that the information is up-to-date and consistent. To provide academic guidance in a consistent way: by having all the reference information stored electronically in one place and using the same (set of) program(s) to advise students on which courses to take next, inconsistencies that used to occur with personal advising are minimized. To make advising-related information available in asingle place, in electronic format: it is expected thatthe system be a portal for any undergraduate DOSCST student in need of advising-related information.

METHODOLOGY AND TIMELINE The proponents will use the Iterative and Incremental Development Technique to accomplish the main objectives of the study. The Incremental and Development Method makes sure that all phases in the creation of the proposed system are done more than once to ensure that errors would be minimized.

During the planning stage, the proponents will proposed a study according to the needs and problems of the students and advisors in terms of advising subjects. Choosing the proposed study and making the solutions to the problem can be done through discussion within each member of the group. For the group to be able to understand the needs and the solutions to the existing problem of the user requirements phase should be done and observation method will be used by the proponents in data gathering. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY The proposed Web-based academic advising system would enhance the conventional advising process. Major benefits brought by this system include: Availability of accessing official advising information from any place, using a Web browser. Ability to quickly find answers to most common advising questions. Reduction in the amount of time and energy spent by advisors on repetitive tasks. Reduction of inconsistencies, omissions, and ambiguities, in the advising rules and procedures. Reduction of traffic in advisors offices during critical periods (e.g., (advance) registration). Concentration of relevant advising information, in electronic format, in a single place.

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