Implementation of an Intelligent Course Advisory Expert System

Academic advising of students is an expert task that requires a lot of time, and intellectual investments from the human agent saddled with such a responsibility. In addition, good quality academic advising is subject to availability of experienced and committed personnel to undertake the task. However, there are instances when there is paucity of capable human adviser, or where qualified persons are not readily available because of other pressing commitments, which will make system-based decision support desirable and useful. In this work, we present the design and implementation of an intelligent Course Advisory Expert System (CAES) that uses a combination of rule based reasoning (RBR) and case based reasoning (CBR) to recommend courses that a student should register in a specific semester, by making recommendation based on the student’s academic history. The evaluation of CAES yielded satisfactory performance in terms of credibility of its recommendations and usability. Keywords—Academic advising; expert system; case-based reasoning; JESS; rule-based reasoning; evaluation