ASSESSING THE ELECTRONIC ACADEMIC ADVISING SUCCESS: AN EVALUATION STUDY OF ADVISORS SATISFACTION IN HIGHER EDUCATION

There is a considerable burden on the universities in providing responsive academic advising programs for students, thus there must be an electronic academic advising system that contributes to solve the problem of academic advising absence in colleges. Hence, in 2014 a visionary e-Academic Advising project was initiated at King Abdulaziz University (KAU) of Saudi Arabia. The developed e-Academic Advising System aims to accommodate the basic operations required by the academic advisor to communicate with students. These include electronic communications using KAU academic information system (ODUS plus), scheduling an appointment, comparing study plans, registration, and other related operations: such as deleting, adding, or changing sections and/or courses. The e-Academic Advising System was evaluated by constant follow-up through committees and colleges; where the interaction of academic advisors with their students through the system is reviewed and statistics guidelines are examined. For the purpose of this research a focus group was conducted with the academic advisors to gather perceptions and comments on their use of the e-Academic Advising System. Thus, this research work used a qualitative approach to analyze and evaluate the system dependency, relative advantages, and usefulness; it finally offers the possible future development of such systems. The study found an outstanding acceptance by academic advisors for the proposed project. It also found that there is a notable impact on students performance. Few recommendations and enhancements were recorded for future research projects.