A web-based system for final year project supervisor / supervisees recommendation / Arifah Najwa Mohd Lotfi

The aim of this study is to address the inherent issue in finding suitable supervisor/supervisee match among lecturers and students. The idea is to develop a web-based system for final year project supervisors/supervisees recommendation. The common problems encountered by any students are confusion in deciding one's project area based on his or her strengths and difficulty in finding potential supervisor because there is lack of readily available information about lecturers' research interest. Final year project is a compulsory two semester long course that every final year student has to undertake. To ensure well management of final year project, there is a need to have an integrated system that begins with finding suitable match among supervisors and supervisees. Therefore, the study has successfully developed a web-based final year project recommender system. The Rapid Application Development was adapted as its development methodology. In this system, students have to answer some questions pertaining to student research interest. Lecturers, on the other hand have to provide inputs on their current research area of expertise. The system will return result to the students by listing his or her most recommended research area along with a list of matching lecturer(s). Student may choose to submit request to the respective lecturer(s). After student sent request to the potential supervisor, lecturer can click approve or reject the student. The notification will appear in the student main page. This web-based system has been developed using PHP and HTML, and SQL for database. A User Acceptance Test (UAT) based on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was conducted with 30 participants. They were lecturers and students in Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, UiTM Perlis. The results indicate positive acceptance where 98% users strongly agreed that this system is easy to use.