Implementing a central system for course rating and evaluating by students

Implementing a central system for course rating and evaluating by students

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

This chapter discusses the introductory part of the thesis which includes background of the study, research motivations and goals, the research questions the thesis attempts to answer, the methodology used to answer those questions and finally the summary of the thesis contribution to knowledge.

Background to the Study

 

Central system for course rating and evaluating by students is a web-based course evaluation tool to help rate courses and instructors. The electronic questionnaire allows students to provide feedback, which is used to improve courses and instruction. All course ratings are confidential. After the course ratings period ends and final grades are posted, instructors can access the results for each course, but they cannot link responses to individual students.

 

A lot of issue has been developed due to this course system method which has been conducting manually using a software called Microsoft Excel. All lecturers are having their preferable courses where their expertise field play the most important role on that issue. The lecturer is the biggest guide for the student lecturing in the courses that students taking on the semester. It doesn’t mean that all the lecturer can only teach few courses according to their expertise to be lectured for the students but they also can teach all courses which has not on their expertise field. Due to that doing on manual student course rating system they could not get the preferred course, due to that a system has to be develop accordingly. The system also minimizes the usage of paperwork and user friendly for the administrators to log in and edit if any changes required for the course allocation. The system will print out a output of a list stated for lecturers on their preferred course.

A major challenge faced by university academics is the effective management of large amounts and various types of data that are encountered in day-to-day operation, ranging from personal data to varied types of documents. The data have various access privileges and restrictions and will be input by a variety of sources, ranging from individuals themselves (e.g., a current student or applicant submits a resume), to a member of the faculty to a member of the departmental administration (e.g., Head of Department who manages the affairs of the Department), to automatic uploading of transcripts or test scores for an applicant. Automatically generated statistics regarding this information will be used by many different stakeholders, both inside and outside the department. Traditional paper- based operation is not only costly but also ineffective.

We designed and implemented a central system for course ratingto effectively manage school information. The design of the overall system follows the guidelines from the Design Science for Information System (Hevner A., et al, 2004)and benefits from the study in Computer-Supported Co-operative Work (CSCW) (Grundin, Computer Supported Cooperative Work History and Focus, 2005). To increase the usability of our system, we followed Computer-Human Interaction (The Apache Software, 2007) and Iterative Design guidelines (Denning, 1997).

Research Motivation and Goals

The greatest challenge of today’s information system design is to provide users with the required functionality needed for the organization which, in many cases, happens not to be possible or requires huge resources including money, time and highly skilled personnel. Information systems of many Nigerian Universities suffer from some of the following challenges:

  1. Ineffective management of the large amounts and different types of data
  2. Inability to cater for different user categories with various access privileges and restrictions
  3. Lack of related components that need to be integrated together such as registration and academics.
    • Lack of robust, portable and extensible components that support efficient data management.

The objective of the research in this thesis is to develop a robust Implementing a central system for course rating and evaluating by students.

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