Towards a digital service to help the elaboration, implementation and follow-up of study regulations at the University of Geneva - a hands-on experiment

Abstract

Writing study regulations for academic study programs and automatically implementing those regulations is a difficult task that involves a variety of actors and requires at each step careful compliance to the constraints defined in the regulations. This paper describes: (1) the innovation process, taking place through a hands-on experiment, that lead the R&D Unit of the University of Geneva to provide a proposal for a digital service targeting the above purpose; (2) the actual design of such a digital service, providing various functionalities: (a) the elaboration of study regulations; (b) the elaboration of the corresponding study plan; (c) the actual implementation of the study plan through the information system. The digital service relies on two main ideas: (1) all study regulations and study plans are built from common atomic elements, that we call building blocks; (2) ensuring compliance to various constraints is achieved through a reasoning engine capturing the constraints defined over an ontology of the study regulations domain. Each year, for a given University, several study regulations, with various constraints and structure are defined or updated. They all need to be carefully crafted and implemented. The work presented in this paper has the potential to alleviate and improve this task for the various actors involved (students, program directors, lawyers, scientific committee members, study advisor, information systems managers, students’ office).