Table of Contents
Our expert system, ICExpert (ICE), will be used at the Instructional Center (IC) located in the University of Washington Seattle campus. The IC, a component of the Office of Minority Affairs (OMA) Educational Opportunity Program (EOP), is an academic support program. The IC is staffed by 17 professional instructors and often over 100 peer tutors. Their objective is to help students get the academic assistance they need in a positive and efficient manner.
Alfredia Blakey-Vinson, IC’s Administrative Support Supervisor, is our chosen expert for our system. She has worked at the IC for 25 years where she started as Office Assistant I, then IC Program Coordinator. Now, she has a new title of "Administrative Support Supervisor" which includes her all her previous duties of her previous titles. Alfredia has no full-time assistant but replies on her administrative support staff that consists of students that come and go each academic quarter.
In the course of daily operations, our expert is responsible for maintaining the efficiency of the IC, train and supervises over 10 students in her Administrative Support team, and timely responses to bureaucratic issues. Our expert’s prior experience is crucial in completing certain task that requires knowledge of the whole UW campus. She is also in charge of all administrative support protocols.
The purpose of this project, ICExpert (ICE) is to create an expert system to guide administrative staff when our expert, Alfredia Blakey-Vinson, is unavailable so they will be proficient. ICE currently covers these tasks:
Administrative support staffs, our anticipated users, are usually students in a variety of programs and wide range of abilities. Each academic quarter, there are new administrative support staffs. Because of this, ICE needed to be straightforward for the reason that computer experience varies.
ICE allows it’s users, administrative support staff, to complete tasks without the presence of our expert in a timely manner. It eliminates the guessing and searching for someone who might know the answer and gives him or her a source to be proficient in their job. This also frees up more of their time to be able to work on their course work when the office is slow. In using ICE, they will also get more detailed and proper training.
ICE benefits our expert by allowing more time for; other tasks without interruptions, vacations without being bothered or worried, and to go home when ill without phone calls regarding work. When training new administrative support staff, she would just need to familiarize them with the location of files and other paperwork, and how to navigate ICE. ICE will also allow her to make improvements on the overall organization and create more efficient protocols.
For the organization, since ICE aids the expert and the administrative support staff, it will also reap from the benefits. The Instructional Center’s daily operations will run smoother when the expert is in, home ill or on vacation. IC staff will be confident that the administrative support staff will be more reliable on a regular basis.
Our system will be available during all working hours for anyone who needs to access information needed from our expert to do administrative tasks. Our system will provide detailed procedures, contacts, locations (files, items, contacts and other information), and phone numbers that is need to complete their tasks. For each task, ICE requires a response from the user. We found that requiring long responses from the users be often misspelled. Therefore, responses are a menu number, yes or no, or a simple response of y or n. This makes ICE easier to navigate and learn. Having users of different lengths of employment and knowledge of the tasks influenced us to make ICE a more detailed and procedural system. This does not cause any implications or burden to those with some knowledge because their employment is usually short, and it offers knowledge of other tasks that are only done on a need only basis. For example, finding knowledge of what of do when the toilet floods or the copier breaks down. In designing ICE, we make the assumption that each user is familiar with the office. ICE assumes they know where the general location of files, books, binders and supplies. These are things are usually on a shelf, drawer, on the desk, or on the wall (for locating room numbers).
The following is an example of how someone might use our system. To run the program, start clipswin, then go to the file drop down menu and load the batch file "ICE.bat". The first thing that the user will see is a greeting from the (ICE) Instructional Center Expert followed by a main menu. Some of the main menu topics lead the user through a specific procedure, and others only allow the user to view general information. I will explain a little about each type of topic and give an example.
Some of the options, in the main menu, would ask that the user to answer a series of yes or no questions. These options are Student Registration, Math Placement, and Personnel.
Here is one scenario:
A student comes into the Instructional Center wanting to use the services, and goes to the front desk to register. If the person working at the help desk is unaware of the steps involved in registering a new student, he/she would:
During the questioning process:
Other main menu options, such as Maintenance, Copier, and Telephone procedures do not ask the user specific yes or no questions. Instead the user chooses from a series of menu options in order to find the relevant information. For example, if the user needed information about the maintenance of the copy machine, they can either choose Copier or Maintenance from the main menu (by entering the number associated with the desired menu option). Both the Copier and Maintenance menu options have a route to the copy machine maintenance information. From there the user would choose, from a sub-menu, whether they want service and repair information or information regarding copier supplies.
Our main problem was in assessing and acquiring the knowledge. It was difficult to concentrate when our expert was constantly distracted away from us, not available to answer questions, or out ill. So, we decided, as part of acquiring knowledge, we needed to work in the administrative office with the expert to be more familiar with the acronyms and procedures. Because of all the information and our time constraints, we needed to recruit an administrative support staff member, Jenn E. Castro, to act as a liaison to our expert.
When we heard our expert had an old handbook for us, we were excited. Then, we received the handbook that consisted of 5 pages we weren’t so excited. Now they have a functional handbook that is organized and can be easily updated.
During our initial interview, we were told a lot of information, which seemed to be sufficient. When we were organizing and categorizing the knowledge, we realized that she seemed to have left out certain details and assumed we had a working knowledge of it. We had to excuse her because she covers a lot of different areas and tasks and has been working at the IC for 25 years. Although we acquired a lot of knowledge from the expert, there is currently still more to extract from her.
During testing with student helpers, we realized that having them spell out long responses (for example, summer/autumn/winter/spring) allowed for misspelled words which didn’t allow the rule to fire. Our solution to this problem was to only require simple responses, such as a menu number, yes or no, or a simple response of y or n. This also made navigation easier too deal with for the administrative support novices. They are able to skim through ICE and go to information they are seeking.
ICExpert would be ideal if it was implemented with JESS. Given more time, we would have implemented it with JESS and added ICE to the Instructional Center’s web site that is currently being built. This way then they can access it from any desk in the building. We can also include a section for general questions for their students and the general public. However, ICExpert is currently only useful to Administrative staff and staff.
Because of the Instructional Center’s minimal funding, it will be difficult to hire someone to update the information. It is an application that requires constant updating of policies. We would like to write were ICExpert is implemented with a database that is editable so they can maintain without the knowledge of CLIPS or JESS.
Another feature that was suggested by the director of the IC and our expert is integrating their student registration forms to the system with a database. It would keep track of all the current registered students and based on each of the area’s capacity, ICExpert would determine if the student would be accepted based on space, GPA, and area of interest.
Blakey-Vinson, Alfredia. "Instructional Center Administrative Support Handbook", U of Washington, 1993.