The AskOski Project seeks to improve equity and achievement in higher education by making colleges and universities first-class beneficiaries of human-centered AI research.
AskOski, named after Cal's sports mascot, is a personalized academic exploration and degree planning system that collects various University data into a central platform allowing students to illuminate the academic terrain of their institution like never before. The system incorporates degree audit, course description, class schedule, future course preferences, and historic enrollment information combined with machine learning to help students explore their interests, connect course concepts across departments and draw up plans for future semesters while satisfying constraints of their programs.
This system is a product of ongoing research in data science, education, and cognition conducted by the Computational Approaches to Human Learning (CAHL) research lab. It is not meant to replace academic advising but rather allow students to benefits from the course pathways taken by students with similar course histories and majors and explore topical relationships between courses as informed by their peers. In this sense, the recommendations provided are not objective, but rather an alternative source of perspective on the conceptual landscape of the university which we hope students find informative.
Projects in learning analytics, such as this one, require the engagement of a cross-campus community. Our research is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (#1547055 and #1446641) and Schmidt Futures. The system's data feeds are made possible by Enterprise Data & Analytics (ED&A) with approval and feedback from the UC Berkeley Office of the Registrar (OR). User studies conducted for research purposes have been approved by an Internal Review Board where deemed necessary by the UC Berkeley Committee for Protection of Human Subjects. We thank the following UCB staff and leadership for their essential past and continuing support: Andrew Eppig (OPA), Sanghamithra Bandi (ED&A), Radha Karichedu (ED&A), Aswan Movva (ED&A), Anji Gannavarapu (EDW), Mark Chiang (ex-EDW), Daniel Grieb (RTL), Raul Infante (OR), Max Michel (ex-ED&A), Jenn Stringer (CIO), Larry Conrad (ex-CIO), Johanna Metzgar (ex-OR), and Walter Wong (Registrar).