About | ISAAC

Meet ISAAC, the ultimate academic advising sidekick!

With ISAAC, advisers can effortlessly answer student questions without needing to schedule an appointment and take academic advising to the next level.

It all started with our personal experiences as undergraduate INFO students of the iSchool...

Elbert Cheng

Project Lead

Alan Wen

Project Engineer

Keith Ellingwood

Data Engineer

Ryan Langford

Frontend Engineer

Brian Park

Frontend Engineer

Alan emailed the iSchool Advising team...

Hi! I took 15 credits of Japanese at UW-Bothell and got only five. Could I get the other 10 credits transferred over? Thanks!

5/11/2022

Hi... I wanted to follow-up on my previous email...

9/12/2022

"I apologize for the delayed response. Our office was short staffed, and many emails got buried in our inbox - I saw that your message was still unresolved..."

9/13/2022

On December 12th, 2022, we met with the iSchool Advising team learn more about their challenges and how we could help.

Dowell Eugenio

iSchool Adviser*

Elisa Tran

iSchool Adviser

Matt Trease

iSchool Adviser

Kathy Mitchell

iSchool Adviser

* = Project Owner

From our user interviews and research:

Advising inquiries can be broken into an abstraction of complexities.

Simple, Objective Questions

Questions that have objective answers derived from sources of truth like university/departmental policies.
No need to get a human adviser involved.
e.g. Could I replace INFO 330 (Database and Data Modeling) with CSE 414 (Introduction to Database Systems)?

Complex, Subjective Questions

Questions that have subjective answers that require human judgement.
Requires a human adviser to effectively guide students
e.g. I am a transfer student and I am not sure if I should take INFO 200 (Intellectual Foundations of Informatics) or INFO 201 (Technical Foundations of Informatics) first.

To validate our problem, we extensively interviewed the iSchool Advising team and iSchool students to define pain points for the current method of getting simple advising questions answered.

iSchool Adviser

Increased email inquiries for simple, objective questions post-COVID.
The iSchool enrolled 839 students in 2022 and plans to admit up to 1,400 annually in the future, leading to a heavier workload for the advising team.
Need to create and maintain a FAQ page.
Unable to track article usefulness or student interest.
Advisers are unable to update information on the official website promptly so they need to use external platforms to deliver information to students.

UW Student

Multiple sources of information, like the Canvas Informatics Resource Site and UW Degree Audit, have outdated and conflicting information.
Some students are not aware of current information resources, such as the Canvas Informatics Resource Site.
Current methods of contacting advisers for simple questions are time inefficient and require scheduling appointments far in advance.
Canvas Informatics Resource Site lacks search capabilities.

So how might we streamline the processing of simple advising questions for both students and student services?

Why should you choose ISAAC?

We have upgraded upon the current experience for the advisers to easily maintain and distribute information to students, and for the students to consume information in a quick, searchable manner.