An optimization‐based decision support system for students' personalized long‐term course planning

This paper intends to facilitate academic advising by means of optimal long‐term course planning (LTCP), which is instrumental in students' retention and success. LTCP ensures that students will satisfy the educational requirements without facing unnecessary delays. The proposed decision support system is based on an optimization model which deals with several student preferences, that is, maximum credits per semester, difficulty of courses, graduation semester, and elective courses priorities. The proposed system has been implemented in an industrial engineering department, and several improvements and modifications have been done based on student feedback. The developed system supports two kind of users, that is, educational staff and the students. The courses, their relationships, and regulation parameters are defined/set by educational staff, whereas students determine their own information and preferences, for example, finished courses, graduation target, interest for each elective course, complexity of courses, course load and complexity for each semester, and relative weights of objective functions. Considering theoretical issues, common applications have been integrated to form this system with simple and user‐friendly interfaces.

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