ET: an Enrolment Tool to Generate Expert Systems for University Courses

Expert Systems are in use today in many fields where there exists a well-defined problem domain (Giarratano & Riley, 2005). In this chapter, XML is used to help define a knowledge domain for academic course rules and used as the starting point for web-base expert systems. Requirements for the satisfactory completion of university and college courses can be quite complex. Courses such as undergraduate bachelor degrees and postgraduate masters degrees are typically composed of units (sometimes called subjects) that must be completed according to the course rules. Such rules may impose constraints on the units that may be taken from specific groups of units, as well as constraints like prerequisite units and corequisite units. Many universities designate a human expert – the Course Coordinator, to guide students through their enrolment process to ensure that students' programs conform to course rules. In addition, many universities provide web-based descriptions of courses and units. However, such web sites are usually purely descriptive and lack a level of interaction with students that would enable answers to complex enrolment questions. It is therefore tempting to consider the automation of the course coordinator's role and its delivery. This chapter will provide a detailed description of the generation of a variety of expert system products intended to provide online advice to students about university bachelor and masters level courses. These products include course rules, unit descriptions, enrolment advice and course planners. They are designed following knowledge acquisition from experienced academic course coordinators about typical student queries in relation to their enrolment choices. An XML Document Type Definition (DTD) will be described for university and college courses. It will be compatible with the European Credit Transfer System (EU, 2004), thus allowing a course to be composed of units with set credit points, term or semester of offering, and other unit constraints. Course rules may be expressed in terms of credit point requirements from groups of units. The XML data definition is sufficient to express the typical course requirement rules of higher education institutions such as universities and colleges.