Student Advising Platform

Part of the worlds-biggest-software-project initiative.

An AI-native, open-source platform for degree audit, academic planning, and proactive student intervention that gives advisors a unified picture of every student without vendor lock-in.

Higher education advisors are responsible for guiding students to graduation, yet they routinely manage caseloads of 500+ students using data scattered across SIS, LMS, financial aid, and support-service systems that do not talk to each other. The Student Advising Platform consolidates degree audit, multi-term planning, early alerts, and referral tracking into a single open-source system, augmented by AI capabilities that automate the manual data assembly and pattern recognition advisors currently perform by hand.

Why Student Advising Platform?

Advisor caseloads are unsustainable. At many institutions, advisor-to-student ratios exceed 1:500. Reactive advising means at-risk students are identified only after their situation has deteriorated significantly. Scalable, AI-assisted proactive monitoring is needed to close this gap.
Data is fragmented across siloed systems. Assembling a complete student picture requires manually pulling information from SIS, LMS, financial aid, and student services platforms. No open-source tool unifies this data automatically for each advising session.
Incumbent solutions impose vendor lock-in. Ellucian Degree Works is tightly coupled to Banner/Colleague. Workday Student advising only works within the Workday SIS. Salesforce Education Cloud requires expensive Salesforce expertise and licensing. Institutions without these ecosystems face complex, costly integrations.
Existing platforms lack genuine AI advising capabilities. EAB Navigate has no generative AI features. Degree Works has no AI-powered risk scoring. No platform yet delivers LLM-powered conversational advising that can answer nuanced student questions about degree requirements in natural language.
Community colleges are underserved. The institutions with the most acute retention challenges and highest caseload ratios have the fewest resources for enterprise SaaS licensing. An open-source, self-hostable option with AI-assisted advising at scale is conspicuously absent from the market.

Key Features

Degree Audit and Academic Planning

Real-time compliance checking of completed and in-progress coursework against configurable degree requirements, with support for multiple programs, minors, and concentrations
What-if analysis to model major, minor, or catalog year changes without committing to the official record
Multi-term course planning with prerequisite conflict detection and course availability awareness
Transfer credit articulation with equivalency rules, exception workflows, and prospective student preview
Credential Discovery to surface unrealised graduation eligibility across all declared and undeclared programs

Early Alert and Intervention

Configurable at-risk triggers based on grade thresholds, LMS attendance and assignment data, financial holds, and advising contact gaps
Faculty-facing alert submission forms that route to advisor task queues
Predictive risk scoring using institution-specific ML models with explainability output
Structured referral workflows to tutoring, mental health, disability services, and financial aid, with outcome tracking to close the referral loop

Advisor Workflow and Caseload Management

Caseload dashboard showing assigned students, pending alerts, outstanding tasks, and approaching milestones (probation deadlines, graduation windows)
Appointment scheduling with calendar sync and student-facing booking
Structured case notes linked to student advising records
Bulk outreach campaigns via email and SMS to filtered student cohorts
AI-generated pre-meeting briefings that automatically assemble student context from all connected systems

Student Self-Service

Student-facing portal for viewing degree progress, planning upcoming terms, and checking graduation eligibility
Appointment booking and intake form completion
Natural-language Q&A chatbot for degree requirement and course selection questions (backlog)

Analytics and Reporting

Institution-level reporting on retention rates, time to graduation, advising contact frequency, and early alert response rates
Equity-disaggregated metrics by demographic subgroup
Program effectiveness evaluation using propensity score matching

AI-Native Advantage

Current advising platforms bolt analytics onto legacy architectures or require separate products for risk scoring. This platform is designed from the ground up with AI at the core: ML-based risk models replace rigid threshold triggers, LLM-generated briefings eliminate the manual data assembly that consumes advisor time before every meeting, AI-assisted catalog rule authoring can generate degree requirement rules from uploaded catalog PDFs, and AI-suggested transfer credit equivalency mappings with human-in-the-loop confirmation replace fully manual review. The result is a system where advisors spend time on meaningful student conversations rather than administrative data wrangling.

Tech Stack & Deployment

Deployment modes: Self-hosted, cloud, or hybrid, giving institutions full control over student data governance (FERPA compliance)
SIS integration: Live data feed support for Banner, Colleague, PeopleSoft, and Workday Student via configurable connectors
LMS integration: Canvas and Blackboard grade and attendance data ingestion
Authentication: SAML 2.0 and OIDC for institutional identity providers
Standards alignment: 1EdTech Edu-API and LTI Advantage integration planned for interoperability with the broader EdTech ecosystem
API surface: Published OpenAPI 3.x specification for institutional data consumers and third-party integrations; MCP server for LLM tool-use agents (backlog)

Market Context

US higher education institutions enroll approximately 19 million students and lose an estimated $16.5 billion annually in tuition revenue to student attrition. The student success technology market (advising, early alert, degree planning) was estimated at approximately $2 billion in 2025 and is growing at 12-15% annually, driven by demographic enrollment declines that force institutions to improve retention of enrolled students. Primary buyers are provost offices, enrollment management divisions, and student affairs leadership at four-year universities and community colleges.

Project Status

This project is in the research and specification phase.
Contributions, feedback, and domain expertise are welcome.

Contributing

We welcome contributions from developers, domain experts, and potential users. See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

Important: All contributions must be your own original work or clearly attributed open-source material with a compatible licence. Copyright infringement and licence violations will not be tolerated and will result in immediate removal of the offending contribution. If you are unsure whether a piece of code, text, or other material is safe to contribute, open an issue and ask before submitting.

Licence

Licence to be determined. See discussion for context.