Academic Advising for University Students in the Digital Environment

Abstract

Academic advising serves as the connective link between students, training programs, and the university, directly shaping learning outcomes and student engagement within credit-based training systems. Digital transformation, big data, and artificial intelligence are profoundly reshaping how this activity is delivered, shifting from traditional face-to-face advising toward e-advising systems, AI-driven chatbots, and predictive learning-analytics tools. Using a literature-review approach, this paper synthesizes domestic and international research on academic advising to clarify: (1) the nature and theoretical models of academic advising; (2) the impact of digital transformation on the role and modalities of academic advising in universities; (3) the categories of technological tools currently applied to support academic advising in the digital environment, including e-advising systems, AI chatbots, and learning analytics combined with recommender systems for predicting academic performance and advising on course selection; and (4) the data-ethics and algorithmic-fairness risks that must be managed when deploying these tools. The review finds that academic advising in the digital environment is shifting from an administrative role toward a personalised, developmental advising role, technology-enabled yet still requiring human judgment in consequential decisions; it also identifies a gap in integrating predictive-analytics tools into academic-advising workflows in Vietnam, as well as a gap in the corresponding data-governance framework. On this basis, the paper proposes directions for applying digital technology to academic advising at Vietnamese universities in line with a responsible-AI approach.