Flexible postgraduate programmes give students substantial choice, but this flexibility also increases the complexity of academic planning. Students must coordinate programme rules, course availability, workload, employment, prior professional experience, personal preferences, and future career goals across several semesters. Existing planning systems, decision-support systems, and recommender systems address parts of this problem, but their support is often fragmented. This dissertation proposes and evaluates an integrated approach to career-aware academic planning. It follows a Design Science Research strategy and uses the Master of Science in Business Information Systems programme at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland as a realistic application case. The problem analysis combines findings from the literature with programme and enrolment data, professional-profile analysis, a student workshop, and a survey. The results show that students construct and revise provisional study paths, distinguish between feasible and preferred options, and assign different priorities to workload, timetable fit, instructional preferences, professional experience, and career direction. iModuleBuddy provides the system-level instantiation of the proposed approach. A Course Ontology represents courses, offerings, prerequisites, assessments, semester availability, and scheduling information. The European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations framework provides a shared vocabulary for professional-background and career-goal occupations. JobRanking weights work-experience episodes according to duration, recency, employment intensity, and employment type. Hybrid lexical and embedding-based similarity connects courses with occupations. Multi-criteria scoring and a deterministic planner generate Career-oriented, Experience-oriented, Preference-oriented, and Balanced multi-semester plans under shared feasibility rules. Workload, course difficulty, and semester effort are presented separately as manageability indicators, while a retrieval-augmented explanation layer adds grounded explanations after plan generation. The approach was evaluated in three stages. Component-level validation examined JobRanking, hybrid similarity, and the explanation layer. Structural evaluation across six realistic and boundarycase profiles showed that the planner generated applicable plan variants, preserved programme and prerequisite relations, and remained operational with incomplete or restrictive inputs. An ex post evaluation with 18 students showed positive perceptions of usefulness, relevance, explainability, and intended use. The dissertation contributes an integrated set of concepts, design objectives, representations, methods, and evaluation procedures for career-aware multi-semester planning. iModuleBuddy demonstrates that this design knowledge can be implemented as an operational planning artefact in an existing flexible postgraduate programme.
A Career-Aware Academic Planning and Decision Support System for Flexible Postgraduate Programmes
SPAHIC BOGDANOVIC, MAJA
2026-10-07
Abstract
Flexible postgraduate programmes give students substantial choice, but this flexibility also increases the complexity of academic planning. Students must coordinate programme rules, course availability, workload, employment, prior professional experience, personal preferences, and future career goals across several semesters. Existing planning systems, decision-support systems, and recommender systems address parts of this problem, but their support is often fragmented. This dissertation proposes and evaluates an integrated approach to career-aware academic planning. It follows a Design Science Research strategy and uses the Master of Science in Business Information Systems programme at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland as a realistic application case. The problem analysis combines findings from the literature with programme and enrolment data, professional-profile analysis, a student workshop, and a survey. The results show that students construct and revise provisional study paths, distinguish between feasible and preferred options, and assign different priorities to workload, timetable fit, instructional preferences, professional experience, and career direction. iModuleBuddy provides the system-level instantiation of the proposed approach. A Course Ontology represents courses, offerings, prerequisites, assessments, semester availability, and scheduling information. The European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations framework provides a shared vocabulary for professional-background and career-goal occupations. JobRanking weights work-experience episodes according to duration, recency, employment intensity, and employment type. Hybrid lexical and embedding-based similarity connects courses with occupations. Multi-criteria scoring and a deterministic planner generate Career-oriented, Experience-oriented, Preference-oriented, and Balanced multi-semester plans under shared feasibility rules. Workload, course difficulty, and semester effort are presented separately as manageability indicators, while a retrieval-augmented explanation layer adds grounded explanations after plan generation. The approach was evaluated in three stages. Component-level validation examined JobRanking, hybrid similarity, and the explanation layer. Structural evaluation across six realistic and boundarycase profiles showed that the planner generated applicable plan variants, preserved programme and prerequisite relations, and remained operational with incomplete or restrictive inputs. An ex post evaluation with 18 students showed positive perceptions of usefulness, relevance, explainability, and intended use. The dissertation contributes an integrated set of concepts, design objectives, representations, methods, and evaluation procedures for career-aware multi-semester planning. iModuleBuddy demonstrates that this design knowledge can be implemented as an operational planning artefact in an existing flexible postgraduate programme.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
