Implementation of an Academic Counselling Online Platform

Abstract

Academic stress is a factor that can affect the mental health of students. It may take the form of peer pressure, doing poorly in tests, or even submitting a requirement late. With the current coronavirus pandemic, most schools have opted to do online classes. However, some students find difficulty in doing online classes due to the lack of resources. Other services such as counseling are also put to a halt. Monitoring the students’ mental health is now more difficult with the current online class setup. For this purpose, we developed web-based mental health monitoring platform for educational institutions, which can be used by mandated school personnel e.g. guidance counselors to continue to address the mental health concerns of students brought about by academic stress. With the deployment of this platform, we found that the students respond positively to online sessions and consult with their academic counselors as we intended to replicate the dynamics of face to face sessions. We have deployed this platform in a specific University in the Philippines and to be able to provide this essential service to the student constituents even at this time of pandemic. We also designed the platform to incorporate topic models and sentiment for analytics and visualization of the anonymized data to inform the University as to the necessary improvement and needs of the students pertaining to their mental health concerns.