Design and Implementation of an Online Clearing System for Graduating Students
Chapter One
OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY.
- To identify issues associated with current process of clearing final year students in Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology.
- To design and implement an automated clearing system for Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology.
- To effectively and efficiently process students clearance.
- To provide borderless access.
- To ensure prompt clearance.
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW
INTRODUCTION
The essence of this review is to make known of some other research made in relevance to the project topic. Many researchers have made some findings on how this problem can be solved and achieve the objective of the subject.
As many tertiary institutions as have chosen to pursue the dynamic educational options available online, the advantages of e-learning are now many. As people of this generation become more dependent on the internet for information, the need for an online clearance system becomes more apparent. The skills needed to access and comprehend information online are becoming commonplace, and the flexibility of wireless computing means that any coffee shop, airport or bedroom can become a classroom. Online courses, registrations, clearance have few, if any scheduling restrictions, well-integrated learning resources and competitive degree options, with an online clearance system.
Online system has become a central element of the discourse on higher education. There seems to be an overall derive towards online system given the mountain need for flexibility in scheduling and the daily emergency of communication technology and capabilities.
ROLES OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN THE ACADEMIC SYSTEM.
Information technology has influenced our daily lives in day to day basis and as days continue the more technology also grows. In our current society information technology has enabled people to be able to buy goods online and communicate with each other from a wide range distance.
Information technology has also influenced us academically, some of the roles of information technology in academic systems include:
- It has provided and implemented life long learning and education.
- It has promoted equal opportunities to obtain education and information.
- It has supported schools in sharing experiences and information with others.
- It has increased a variety of educational services and medium /method.
- It has promoted the development of learning skills expansion of optional education, open source of education etc.
DATA AND INFORMATION.
Data can be defined as a representation of facts, concepts or instructions in a formalized manner which should be suitable for communication, interpretation, or processing by human or electronic machine.
Information on the other hand is the processed data on which decisions and actions are based. Information is organized or classified data which has some meaningful values for the receiver.
In the design and implementation system, students will be able to input data to the data base and it should be able to output their information based on clearance whether they have cleared or some of their information is pending in the system that should be updated.
For the decision to be meaningful, the processed data must qualify for the following characteristics:
CHAPTER THREE
METHODOLOGY
GENERAL ANALYSIS OF THE EXISTING SYSTEM
When a student is about to graduate, he/she will take his/her degree exam after which he obtain clearance letter from various departments and unions. The registrar office carefully reviews each degree candidate certificate to faculty that the candidate has completed his requirements for the degree. Also the bursary has to certify that the student has completed all fee payment.
The current clearance system of the university is a manual one. This make the system tedious and time consuming. Here students have to visit all the clearance offices with a form for them to sign, once this forms are signed, it signifies that the student has cleared, the process take some months to be completed and processes a lot of stress to both staffs and the student involved. In the manual clearance form is needed, a search operation is conducted on the file cabinet to locate a particular student clearance form.
METHOD OF DATA COLLECTION
During this project research work, data needed for the project was gathered from the various sources. In gathering and collecting necessary data and information needed from the system analyses two major fact finding techniques were used in this work and they include:
Primary source
This refers to the source of collecting original data in which the researcher made use of empirical approach such as personal interview and questionnaires.
Secondary source
The secondary sdata were obtained by the researcher from magazines, journals, newspapers, library source and internet downloads. The data collected from this means have been covered in literature review in chapter two.
CHAPTER FOUR
SYSTEM DESIGN
DESIGN STANDARDS
The new system is structured to work with the standard software development procedure. In order to achieve effective online clearance system, structured system analysis and design methodology(SSADM) were used. This is because SSADM is an internationally accepted software engineering model mainly used in most result oriented analysis and design.
CHAPTER FIVE
SUMMARY, CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
SUMMARY
The use of computer software based online clearance system forms the basis of the school management decision. It aims at providing the management with adequate, effective, well documented up-to-date and formatted output. To help as a tool in planning and decision making/based on the student clearance form.
The lack of learner outcome variation of the online system signals the establishment of concurrency between the two measures even though they are measures of same construct. This investigation supports the use the online system delivery structure to broaden the instruction audience in technology education program.
The use of online clearance system in technology education at the university remain at the minimal level as suggested by the 80 percent of the online student participant, predominantly technology education measures who report that they have not done online clearance previously. Also 75 percent of online student participant report that they have not used computer software base online clearance system previously. Having come to completion of this project work a lot of achievement was made and they include;
- The replacement of error prone manual system with new automated online clearance system.
- Data can now be processed with great speed and efficiency.
- The application has the ability to update record in various files automatically there relieving the university staff the stress from working from file to file.
- The security of data is ensured.
- The use of database server was implemented.
CONCLUSION
Research and development are continuous processes; this is same in computer and software development. However the effectiveness and efficiency of this new system provide room for further improvement. As early mentioned some of the objectives of this project were not actualized due to some limitation. So this objectives could be improved upon, the outline clearance system developed will offer greater opportunity in school management. All transaction or payment with regards to student’s clearance can be carried out online.
RECOMMENDATION
The research work carried out is limited to online clearance only. It would be better if a full portal is developed for effective and wholesome of information management technology in our universities. When this is done the following modules are recommended to include in the portal.
- Developing an online students admission system to enable full tracking of student records
- Automation of student academic record to enable the management to have access to student academic performance.
- Maintaining a central database for accessing information relating to student.
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