ADVICE

ADVICE is a platform developed to aid students and student advisors in helping students with curricular advice. Whilst students usually visit a student advisor, this often leads to the same repetitive questions being asked. The current system leads to student advisors being overworked at times and some student queries not being attended to sufficiently. Though some of the information is readily available on UCT websites, it is not easily accessible with information being scattered across several UCT websites. ADVICE remedies this and provides a platform that collates information, offers summaries of course information and allows calculation of credits. A PDF reader was used to read in information from UCT’s Science and Commerce handbooks and store in a structured format in a database. ADVICE also hosts a chatbot that users can interact with to get answers to basic UCT specific questions. User testing indicated that the platform had great potential in assisting students with curricular questions and would be a valuable addition to the university.