Electrical Engineering Course Planning System
Mohammad S. Laghari
Abstract—Electrical Engineering Department at the United Arab Emirates University
(UAEU) is one such institution where students have faced advising and registration problems depending on number of factors which may include; a lack of a proper advising and course planning system, Advisers and students ability to give and seek good advice, etc. Students with no proper course plan may endure with lose time in selecting unnecessary and wrong courses. Students usually suffer with problems, which may include missing specific courses for appropriate semesters, selecting too many or less courses, etc. An Electrical Engineering Course Planning System (EECPS) is devised for students to plan course selection for the next and appropriate semesters. The result of the course planning and selection procedure is displayed on the monitor as well as stored in a file to show a complete typical plan.
Index Terms—course advising, computer application, electrical engineering, course planning,
software package
I. INTRODUCTION
The newly devised Course Planning System at the Electrical Engineering Department of United Arab Emirates University would help and guide students in planning appropriate courses suitable to register with the online University Registration System. The planning process starts early with students consulting their Academic Advisers. However, this consultation is commonly experienced with delays or even a complete miss out with either Adviser too busy or student too lazy to seek proper advice. More often, the students communicate with Advisers by emailing their course plans but usually end up not following the plans adequately. They typically choose courses, which suits them with respect to offering time of the day and without the realization that some courses need to be taken earlier in their career.
Students without a proper planning system suffer with problems such as class expulsion after two or three weeks of the start because of prerequisites requirement, delayed graduation because of unnecessary additional taken courses, even drop a complete semester because of minimum number of courses requirement, etc. The EECPS is devised to counter such missing out or lost students to solve their planning and registration problems. The planning system helps and guide students in selecting the precise and appropriate courses suitable for online registration.
The paper describes complete operation of the planning package EECPS that includes prioritized course selection, course hierarchies, graphical charts, viewing the course list, and filing of the complete course plan, etc. Students can run the planning program through the department computers and create a typical course selection plan starting from the next semester of entry until the graduation semester. The planning system is also suitable for new and inexperienced advisors to create course plans. The outcome is in the form of a semester wise course selection displayed in the software package and stored in a file for future reference.
II. COURSE PLANNING ®ISTRATION
Before early nineties, at most of the academic institutions throughout the world, the registration process used to involve student registrations at a single place, where most of the registration related activities were to be performed after the requisite form was filled and processed by the concerned department. This (centralized) single point activity used to generate many concerns for queues, fee payments, query handling, and other related issues.
In mid nineties, majority of the well-known academic institutions throughout the world started to address this perspective of registration from many different angles including student advising, student course registration, class scheduling, administrative purposes, etc. Obviously, the objective seemed to produce a highly available application that required working in a distributed environment.
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Department of Electrical Engineering, UAE University, Al Ain, United Arab Emirates Email: mslaghari@uaeu.ac.ae
Beginning nineties, institutions throughout the world have seen a rapid expansion of tertiary education. As twenty first century approached, this trend increased nearly doubled. This rapid expansion has an indirect effect on the institution’s enrolment. The average age of prospective students has increased as well as the number of students. As the demand is stabilized so is, a need to streamline the registration process that maximizes the allocation of course places and increases the number of registered students.
Additionally, the institutions, in general, have progressed to offer programs that are specialized as well as multidisciplinary. This variety of programs has introduced time conflicts vis-à-vis chosen courses. The required registration system(s) are to be developed to provide on-line real time registration for students and enable students to maximize their opportunities in registering courses of their own interest as well as advising students in completing their degree requirements in a best possible way.
The multidisciplinary nature of modern day universities where faculties and departments can typically number as high as 10 and 50, respectively, course registration systems need to be smart enough to comprehend multiple course selections from different faculties and departments. A decent course advising system in this regard can prevent and resolve such conflicts.
The concept of computerized registration system has been to tolerate machine and network failures. It was hoped that most human errors, such as incorrectly inputting data, would be detected by the system as they occurred, but it was expected that some "off-line" data manipulation would be necessary for errors, which had not been foreseen.
Therefore, the success of any attempt to computerize this activity depends on the reliability, availability and integrity of the computer systems, both software and hardware, on which the registration programs are run. Because many of the departments at any university have most likely made significant investments in computer hardware, it is logical that no specialized hardware is to be purchased and software fault-tolerance is to be used instead. The following section looks at some of similar old and recent advising systems.
III. COURSE PLANNING &ADVISING SYSTEMS
The advising software at the Electrical Engineering, Texas Tech University featured a graphical user interface, that allowed students to request only courses for which they have appropriate prerequisites, co-requisites, and standing [1]. Similar work has been investigated by authors on an old and phased out curriculum [2].
A Student Advising Software (SAS) is developed by using JAVA computer programming language. It is a manual procedure, which helps and guides students in selecting appropriate courses suitable for online registration with the Banner University Registration System [3]. An improved version of Student Advising & Planning Software is developed at the Electrical Engineering Department, UAE University. It is an automated system with limited functionality and with an approximate 20% error rate [4]–[6]. A student planning system is devised by two graduating students of the Electrical Engineering Department, UAE University. This system is typically used by students to plan courses for their study plan but with limited help menus [7]. The academics at the Florida Atlantic University developed a similar web-based advising system that supplemented the conventional advising process [8].
A Bayesian Network model for planning course registration and advising by using a data mining technique is developed to predict the sequences of courses to be registered by undergraduate students whose majors are computer science or engineering [9].
A SASSY advising system is developed at the Armstrong Atlantic State University. This system suggests courses for an advisee based on; frequency of the course offering, balancing the course load, shortening the path length to graduation, preference of advisee and entertaining different scenarios of course loads for the entire duration of the advisee’s university life [10].
Two project management tools are designed to help the students complete their degree plan sooner. The first tool provides a visualization map of course sequences, customized for each student, making advising adjustments that will optimize the time to obtain the degree under a constrained set of resources. The second tool is to collect information from multiple students through several semesters and is used to identify bottlenecks in the curriculum [11].
An expert system using JESS (a JAVA based rule engine and scripting environment) is developed that allows students to seek quick responses to their queries regarding their plan of study and progress in the program [12].
The Arjuna distributed system was developed at The University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Its design aims were to provide tools to assist in the construction of highly available, fault tolerant distributed applications using atomic actions. Shrivastava et al. have discussed the design and implementation of a registration system that successfully met their requirements [13], [14].
Another development was completed at the Wylie College IT for software architectural development of a course registration system using the specifications created for the college requirements. The Software Architecture Document provides an architectural overview of the C-Registration System. The C-Registration System was initiated by Wylie College IT to support online course registration [15].
As from one advising and registration system to another are browsed, it has been found that specification document is fundamental and key to further develop a customized university course registration. Furthermore, as programs to be offered vary from institution to institution, and at the same time, universities continuously revise their curriculum as well as program requirements in order to meet market demands, the flexibility and reliability of the registration system to accommodate such changes in the program offerings has been deemed necessary for such a system to survive and evolve.
Thus, the required development work involves customized design of a network-enabled university student registration system that is capable of handling scenarios such as add/drop requests, student advising, availability of courses per term, student's registration status, enrolment summary, reports, etc.
Furthermore, the devised advising system which is under test phase in the department has shown representational efficiency and flexibility, improved performance, and ease of software development and maintenance when compared with some of the mentioned systems.
IV. EECPSSOFTWARE PACKAGE
There are nine UAE University colleges, which accommodate approximately 13,000 students. The student share of the College of Engineering is about 2400 students distributed among five departments. Students from Electrical Engineering Department (240 students) take 147 credit hours to fulfill the requirements of a B.Sc. degree in either of the two fields of Electrical Engineering or Communications Engineering. Typically, the students take from a minimum of nine to a maximum of 13 semesters to complete their degree requirements with an average course work of 15 to 18 credits (4 to 6 courses) per semester.
The total number of the credit hours is divided into University General Requirements Unit - 21 credits, College Requirements Unit - 41 credits, Department Compulsory Specialization Requirements - 52 credits, Department Elective Specialization Requirements - 12 credits, Industrial Training - 15 credits, and the Graduation Projects - 6 credits.
The course planning software package consists of the interface as shown in Fig. 1. The package display consists of a course selections area, selected courses text column, and a set of interactive buttons. The course selection area consists of all courses of the department.
A typical planning session starts with a student’s information queries such as student name, student id, grade point average (GPA), course plan staring semester (Fall or Spring), and the year. The student is then asked to select (by clicking the checkboxes) all the passed courses of the previous semesters and the current semester registered courses.
The checkbox-clicked courses are displayed in the text column on the right of the display. After this selection, the user saves this information in a passed courses file by clicking on the ‘Passed’ button. This file will be used in a future extension of EECPS where the past and the current semester courses will be inputted from the file. Therefore, only the untaken and remaining courses will be displayed to choose. Once the Passed button is clicked then the displayed courses are dimmed to avoid confusion when selecting courses for the remaining semesters.
The system also calculates the total number of planned semesters as well as the average number credit hours to be chosen per semester. This calculation is based on the remaining credit hours and the students GPA.
The system is now ready to select courses for the next semester depending on the saved information of Fall or Spring semester and the year. Student chooses courses of next semester by clicking the remaining course checkboxes. These courses are again displayed in the text column.
Once the course selection for the next semester is complete then by the use of ‘Run’ interactive button this information is saved in a course plan file. Again, the selected courses for the next semester are dimmed in the course selection display as shown in Fig. 2. In the text column of Fig. 2, the selected courses are shown
under Spring 2014. The current course selection is 16 credit hours, total up to date course selection is 68 credit hours, and the remaining out of 147 are 79 credits.
The student is now ready to select courses for the remaining semesters. If the student makes a mistake in a course selection then by deselecting, the checkbox removes the course from the column display and the deselected course is not saved in the file.
The status row at the bottom of the display shows the total of credit hours after the Passed and all Runs. The Fall 2014 semester chosen courses are also shown in Fig. 2. This semester shows another 16 credit hours of course selection. All the remaining courses are shown in bright whereas the selected courses are dimmed.
Fig. 3 shows the remaining of a typical complete plan of the student. The student completes 147 credit hours as shown in the status bar as well as in the text column of course planning consisting of six semesters in addition to the past semesters. All courses are dimmed for the complete course plan.
The software package is well equipped with all the necessary help menus for a student to select the right and suitable courses. The first button in the list is ‘Courses’, which displays information of all course distributions as shown in Fig. 4. The course menu is displayed with a scroll bar to view all required courses.
The next button in the list is ‘Help1’ which shows the color scheme used for courses as shown in Fig. 1. Fig. 5 shows the courses color scheme. This scheme signifies courses offered by different units such as EE department courses, department electives, etc. Courses in red text are university requirements, blue colored courses are college requirements, dark colored are department compulsory requirements, light blue are laboratories, green colored are industrial training and graduation projects, and the purple are departmental electives.
Figure 2. A partial plan of a typical student.
The ‘Help2’ button shows information on the three digits appended and associated with each course. Fig. 6 shows the help associated with each course to guide a student in selecting the necessary and appropriate courses. Example of a course ‘Computer Programming – ELEC 330’ is shown in the Figure. The first digit of ‘0’ indicates that this course is offered in both semesters. Whereas, a ‘1’ is an indication of first semester, and a ‘2’ for the courses offered in the second semester only. A ‘1’ in place of second digit indicates that this course is required for Industrial Training, whereas a ‘0’ is otherwise. This training period is spanned across a complete semester with the eligibility of a student completing 93 credit hours of course work. The third digit indicates the course credit hours. Most of the courses are three credit hours whereas; the lab courses are one credits hour each.
The ‘Course Help’ combo box displays course forward hierarchies of majority of the courses. This hierarchical information helps a student to decide on courses that are preferred on others. Fig. 7.a shows the course help menu and 7.b & 7.c shows the hierarchical information of two typical courses. The ‘*’ shown in the Figure indicates the industrial training requirement. The ‘!’ mark shows that he course is offered in the first (Fall) semester and ‘!!’ indicates the second (Spring) semester.
Figure 5. Color scheme for all courses.
Figure 6. The three-digit help associated with each courses.
Figure 7.a
Figure 7.b
Figure 7.c
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