Academic Orientation Supported by Hybrid Intelligent Decision Support System - Efficient Decision Support Systems: Practice and Challenges from Current to Future - page 258

6.2.2 Supporting decisions
In order to help advisors in their tasks, OrieB offers three different types of support:
 Module recommendation
 Subject recommendation
 Warning difficulties in core subjects
Module or Vocational Program Recommendations
In order to aid advisors guiding students about the Module that better suits them according
to their marks OrieB computes a Module recommendation based on a ordered list by
interest (see Figure 5).
Each recommendation for a module incorporates an interest value and a trust value.
Interest value expresses the appropriateness of a module for the target student based on the
predicted marks. System offers a linguistic term to make and explain recommendations than
precise numerical values that can mislead the students in their decisions. So, OrieB will
provide linguistic recommendations (Castellano 2009a).
Trust value shows the confidence about the previous interest value based on the ratio
between the number of subjects whose predictions were obtained and the total number of
subjects for the module, and the standard deviation of those predictions (Castellano
2009a).
Fig. 5. Vocational Program Recommendation
Support for choosing Elective and Module Subjects
Once students have chosen what module they prefer, they need to complete their
curriculum with module and elective subjects. To support this decision OrieB offers separate
recommendations for each group of subjects (see Figure 6).
Fig. 6. Subject recommendation in OrieB
Warning Difficulties in Core Subjects
Finally, students also may need advices about what core subjects could be difficult for them.
In this sense, the system offers a list with those core subjects with predictions lower than
medium, it will warn the advisor which core subjects could cause difficulties to the student,
with a trust level of the recommendation.