Academic Orientation Supported by Hybrid Intelligent Decision Support System - Efficient Decision Support Systems: Practice and Challenges from Current to Future - page 241

13
Academic Orientation Supported by Hybrid
Intelligent Decision Support System
Emilio J. Castellano, Manuel J. Barranco and Luis Martínez
Department of Computer Sciences/University of Jaén
Spain
1. Introduction
It is common that in all academic systems the students must make decisions about the future
by choosing among different alternatives that include professional profiles or modalities ,
elective subjects or optional , etc. These decisions can have a very important influence in the
academic journey of the students because sometimes a wrong decision can lead to academic
failure or its correction implies a time cost for the students.
It is remarkable that in many academic systems these important decisions have to be made
in early stages in which the students do not have enough maturity or knowledge to be
conscious about the consequences in their future if a wrong decision is made. Ideally these
multiple choices, offered to the students, want to facilitate the acquirement of some
professional and valuable competences to obtain a job. Taking into account that the
suitability of people in jobs or studies is not only restricted to their taste or preferences, but
also other factors involved in the process of acquiring maturity as an adult who develops
any function. These factors such as capacities, skills, attitudes concerning the task, social
attitudes, taste, preferences, etc. (Briñol 2007, Robertson 1993, Salgado 1996, Shevin 2004),
must be taken into account in such processes.
Initially these decision making processes were made by the students themselves or with
their parents support according to different criteria such as, preferences, future job market,
even randomly, etc. Therefore, in order to improve this situation different countries
introduced one figure, so-called advisor , whose role is to guide the students in their decision
making situations regarding their academic future.
The academic orientation process carried out by these advisors imply the review of different
information regarding the students in order to report which academic alternatives suits
better their skills, competences and needs. In most of academic institutions the advisor deals
yearly with several hundreds of students with different skills, personalities, etc. To make an
idea, in Spain, and depending on the high school, advisors can manage from 200 to 800
students. This number of students implies a big search space to find the relevant
information that can facilitate the orientation for each one in a right way, making very hard
to perform successfully the academic orientation process. Hence it seems suitable the
development of automated tools that support the accomplishment of the different processes
of academic orientation to improve the success of advisors' tasks.
An overview of different problems in the real world that deal with search spaces drove us to
pay attention to the situation raised some years ago with the advent of Internet and the