Personalized Academic Thesis Management

Abstract

Academic thesis is an integral part of most academic programs across disciplines. In lots of disciplines actually is also the longest and most important project during students’ life. However, our research finds that thesis management has not received the proper attention in learning management systems beyond mainly the inclusion of thesis in grading management systems. Grading of thesis is only the last step. Actually, thesis management should start when students shall choose the subject for their thesis and their thesis supervisor, it continues with thesis task and milestone progress management and finally closes with thesis submission, defense and grading. The proposed personalized software solution is a four-step system that (a) proposes thesis topics based on personalized profiles, (b) manages applications for thesis to the supervisor, (c) allows thesis progress management and (d) provides functions for its final delivery.The solution is scalable and dynamic so it can support a whole academic institution, any specific department, any laboratory or research group of scientists/supervisors and individual thesis supervisors. The approach has been evaluated in a real life online service by graduate and postgraduate students during their thesis selection process. Analysis of user experience has shown that the proposed approach matches thesis topics to student’s actual choices with accuracy greater than 75% within just the top 5 thesis topics suggested to each student. Moreover, usability of the system has been graded as “A” or “Excellent” based on SUS methodology.