An Adaptive Decision-Support System with Descriptive Analytics for Higher Education Institution’s Student Organizations

Abstract

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the Philippines consider student development services as a significant support system for students' academic experience as well as for institutional development. The complementation of co-curricular activities to academics may lead to students' holistic development.  As these continue, many documents are also being produced in the conduct of those activities. Thus, the decision-making process as well as the management of those documents are difficult tasks for Higher Education Institutions in support of students' welfare and development. Decision-making is a critical phase to analyze document submission of student organizations' developmental activities. This research focused mainly on the design, development, and evaluation of a mechanism for document management with descriptive analytics through data visualization techniques that would help in the decision-making of  HEI's administration.

The researchers designed the system with an analytical model transformed into codes and MySql as backend framework for student organizations' Key Performance Indicators to analyze in real-time the student organizations' document submission. A Rapid Application Development served as the basis for the design, development, and evaluation of the system.

The system addresses data and document management, repository, announcements, communication, dissemination to students, decision-support with the integration of dashboards as part of a descriptive analytics approach. Dashboards provide ease of viewing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to the system's end-users. The system's evaluation obtained an overall weighted mean of 4.43 with a "Very Great Extent" description. This evaluation shows that the system is ready for deployment and implementation.

The automation of operations and analysis of documents will ease users' operations, optimize resources, and aid a timely decision-making process.

Keywords- decision-support system, analytics, descriptive, student organizations, descriptive analytics, DSS, dashboards, data visualization, document management, data analytics, business intelligence