About Us

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. 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. ADVICE also hosts a chatbot that users can interact with to get answers to basic UCT specific questions.

Student advisors are academics in the university who take on the extra role of being advisors to students on their academic careers. They are however often overworked and there is a need for a system to relieve some of the work they perform. We observe that the introduction of a platform that provides a student advisor in virtual form has promise to greatly improve the state of the quality of advice students are given. Students will approach our platform as their first port of call with the hope that most queries will be handled by the system, reducing the number of cases that require student advisors. In cases where one is still needed, the student advisors themselves will also be able to access the platform to gain a first report from the system before giving their advice. This work would be unnecessary if university websites were well collated and organized sources of information, but our review shows that this is not the case. Thus the need is there for a centralised platform that presents all the information students need in an easy-to-use platform. This need will be addressed by our platform.