Design And Implementation Of A Departmental Portal

Introduction

Background of the Study

The role of education as an instrument for promoting the socio-economic, political and cultural development of any nation can never be over-emphasised. According to Abdulkareem (2001), a nation’s growth and development is determined by its human resources. The provision of the much-needed manpower to accelerate the growth and development of the economy has been said to be the main relevance of university education in Nigeria (Ibukun, 1997).

The colonial education which was inherited by Nigeria was criticised for being too theoretical to be able to make meaningful impact on the life of Nigerians (Akinlua, 2007). Subjects taught in schools reflected the taste of the colonial education officials; hence school curricula were built around the existing colonial values. Students were supposed to mimic their teachers in subject like English Language which involved demonstration of competency. The same problem which informed dependency on past colonial education relics seems to have continued till date. Woolman (2001: 41) was forced to comment on issue of this sort in his remark about African education. According to him, “African school systems today still follow the rigid structure of time periods and grade-level progression found in Western education.”

In the rural areas where the majority lived, children learned the skills of farming and other work, as well as the duties of adulthood, from participation in the community. This process was often supplemented by age-based schools in which groups of young boys were instructed in community responsibilities by mature men. By the 1970s, education experts were asking how the system could be integrated into the more formal schooling of the young, but the question remained unresolved by 1990. Western-style education came to Nigeria with the missionaries in the mid-nineteenth century. Although the first mission school was founded in 1843 by Methodists, it was the Anglican Church Missionary Society

that pushed forward in the early 1850s to found a chain of missions and schools, followed quickly in the late 1850s by the Roman Catholics. In 1887 in what is now southern Nigeria, an education department was founded that began setting curricula requirements and administered grants to the mission societies. By 1914, when north and south were united into one colony, there were fifty-nine government and ninety-one mission primary schools in the south; all eleven secondary schools, except for King’s College in Lagos, were run by the missions.

The history of university education in Nigeria started with the Elliot Commission of 1943, which led to the establishment of University College Ibadan (UCI) in 1948. UCI was an affiliate of the University of London (Ike, 1976). According to Ibukun (1997), the UCI was saddled with a number of problems at inception ranging from rigid constitutional provisions, poor staffing, and low enrolment to high dropout rate.

Education is an important and traditional part of society. As time has progressed education has also changed from traditional one to the current modern system of education currently been practised. It also required changing the way of maintaining the student information in the department. The Departmental portal is a web base system that deals with the registration, record updating and maintaining student information.

Currently, schools usage of new technologies is very limited. Most schools have dozens of computers but they are only used for teaching the computer subject and nobody uses them for administration purposes. There are some limited numbers of schools that use a computer instead of a typewriter by using Microsoft Word or for saving some data in Microsoft Excel. However there are numerous tasks that can be done by computers if they are programmed to do, such as managing students’ grades. Students’ grade management is one of the most tedious task of administration staff and teachers of schools, which they have to perform manually at the every school year. Managing students’ grades is a task of administration staff and lecturers of the department, which is very time consuming and error prone.

As more information is made available in a variety of formats and media and in a variety of locations, the need to manage information/data efficiently becomes more and more critical. Both staff and public users want access to stored information and want to access it more efficiently. It is the Department Policy to improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of departmental registration and result processing operations and services through the implementation of an integrated automated database System.

This website is very dynamic and very easy to understand, the interface of the website is very easy and anybody can easily work in our website, this website can provide all the details about the department, courses, subjects, event, news, attendance, result, some important information about fresh news & events. The online departmental management website is also very useful because the student don’t have to read notice board, he can easily view all info. Like result via this website. To make this website work successfully we have used some latest technology such as PHP as the Development Platform, PHP frame work as the development and MYSQL as the Database Management environment.

Statement of the Problem

Today in the department, student details are entered manually. The student details in separate records are tedious task. Referring to all these records and updating is needed. There is a chance for more manual errors. The presence of so many hands on computing the students information gives room for errors, but the fewer the hands involved the less the errors encountered.

Aim and Objectives

The Aim of this project is to create a system whereby common educational challenge can be tackled without much stress from the students or staffs.

Objectives of the project include:

Creating a system whereby students can copy and submit their assignments online.

Gets information about their academic history without necessary going through the course lecturer.

Keep records of all Students in all levels.

Generates quick Result of each and every student.

Automatic Generate student identification number which differs from the matric numbers.

Generate black list for Students.

The system can allow the administrator to select the unnecessary information and delete them from the database.

Administrators have total control on Site; he can delete or edit information.

Provide the facility like send mail for recover password.

Upload course details.

Significance of the Study

The project work will help in a good number of ways to ease the delay in manual departmental processing. The software developed will help the department to achieve efficient information management system. It saves the stress of manual collection of student details, database for registration and examination result is maintained.

Scope of the Study

This system covers the general activities carried out by the departmental administration officer. Some of these activities includes; managing of student information, upload student assignments, time-tables, results. Also it publishes course details which entail the course description, credit unit, course lecturer and course syllabus. Keeping the students and staffs up-to-date with latest news and most recent events is not left out by the system. This system also gives the student the opportunity to keep their information up-to-date by allowing them to edit their profiles.

Limitation of the Study

Each and every system has some limitations that can restrict them to work on a particular environment. On the course of this study, the scope was narrowed down to a few, based on the lack of adequate information concerning the existing system. The Department withheld some information from me because of confidentiality, some of those information withheld includes: Address, Date of Birth, Phone Numbers and Address of Next of Kin. Also, the entire process of the existing system (i.e manual departmental system) was not all spelt out. Based on the fact that this system was narrowed down to the departmental level, little information was not released by the Registry department.

Definition of Terms

Module – One of the parts of a Program

Portal – A dynamic site that allows access to so many modules Database – A large store of data being held in a computer and is easily accessible to a person

Synchronous – A form of transmission in which data is sent as a block using frames or packets

Asynchronous – A form of transmission that transmit only one character at a time and during transmission the character is preceded by a start bit and followed stop bit that lets the receiving device known where a character begins and ends

Stud Id – Abbreviation for Student Identification Number

Black List – Lists that contains students that are either academically lowor have academic indiscipline.

LMS – Learning Management System

VLS – Virtual Learning Environment

DFD – Data Flow Diagram