Course Catalog Optimization via Attendance Prediction
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current solutions fail to efficiently determine optimal study paths for students, leading to excess spending and delayed graduations due to complex registration processes and lack of guidance on career goals, scheduling, and attendance prediction, resulting in inefficient curriculum choices and resource wastage.
Innovation Solution
A method and system that retrieve optimal study paths from a database, estimate attendance, assign class hours, and optimize course catalogs to maximize student enrollment, generating an optimized course catalog based on these assignments.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If students select courses without optimized guidance, then they have freedom of choice, but they take excessive credits and delay graduation
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary optimization of study paths before students actually select courses. By pre-calculating optimal course sequences considering all prerequisites and career goals, students receive guidance on the best path to follow from the beginning, preventing wasted time and excessive credits before they are incurred.
Solution Approach 2:
The system continuously monitors student progress and compares it against optimized study paths. When students deviate from optimal paths or face scheduling conflicts, the system provides feedback and alternative recommendations to get them back on track, ensuring timely graduation while maintaining freedom of choice.
2Ease of operation
If career advisors manually guide students, then personalized advice is provided, but the complexity of course combinations makes optimal path determination impossible
Solution Approach 1:
The patent replaces the manual mechanical process of career advisors analyzing course combinations with an automated computer-based optimization system. The system uses algorithms to efficiently evaluate astronomical numbers of course combinations and identify optimal paths, making the complex task tractable while providing personalized guidance at scale.
Solution Approach 2:
The system creates optimized study path templates for different career goals and student situations. These templates can be copied and adapted to individual students, providing consistent high-quality guidance without requiring advisors to manually analyze each student's unique situation from scratch.
3Adaptability or versatility
If courses are overbooked to ensure availability, then student access is maximized, but educational resources are wasted
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary prediction of course enrollment and attendance before the semester begins. By analyzing optimized study paths and student schedules, it forecasts which courses will be needed and by how many students, allowing institutions to allocate resources in advance rather than over-provisioning to cover uncertainty.
Solution Approach 2:
The system dynamically adjusts course offerings and resource allocation based on predicted demand. Courses are booked with appropriate capacity based on forecasted enrollment, and the system can flexibly modify allocations as the semester progresses and actual enrollment data becomes available, optimizing resource utilization while ensuring availability.
Data Source
AI summary
The method comprises: retrieving, from a database, a plurality of optimal study paths selected by a plurality of students, wherein each of the plurality of optimal study paths is a combination of courses and their order during a plurality of study terms; determining an estimated attendance for each of a plurality of courses designated in the plurality of optimal study paths; assigning class hours to each of the plurality of courses based on the estimated attendance; optimizing the assignment of class hours of the plurality of courses, wherein the optimization maximizes a number students registered to their respective study paths; and generating an optimal course catalog based on the optimized assignment of class hours.