The design and implementation of a pre-enrolment guide for students pursuing higher education

Kenneth Wong, Wai-Shing Ho, Reggie Kwan, Fu Lee Wang, Louise Luk and Michael Cheung
Caritas Institute of Higher Education
Hong Kong SAR, China

One crucial foundation for the career development of students is the programme they choose when they study in a higher education institution. Selecting an appropriate programme can develop students’ strengths and equip them for pursuing their career goals. Moreover, the programme should match the students’ personality so that they can fulfil their potential. However, given the many programmes available in higher education institutions, it can be difficult for them to select the most suitable one by themselves. Even worse, the students may not fully understand their own personality and may not know which programmes suit them best. In order to provide guidance to students on programme selection, our college has created a prototype of a pre-enrolment guide as a part of OASISS 2.0 student advisory system supported by QEGS. The guide first uses a questionnaire to capture the students’ personality based on the Big Five personality traits; and then it suggests the most appropriate programmes to each student according to their personality. In addition, as different programmes have different admission requirements, the guide selects the programmes according to the results or expected results of the students. This paper describes the design and implementation of our pre-enrolment guide. Also, the methodology we used for programme recommendation in our prototype will be discussed and the interface of the system will be outlined.