School Management System

Abstract

This project work automates school management system. In the system two applications are developed, Windows based (thick client) and Web based (thin client).

The windows application takes most of the activities such as offline student registering, transcript and report card generation and producing the timetable. The web application facilitates attendance recording by the homeroom teachers, to view status of students by their parents and to view reports by kebele and kifle-ketema education bureau officials.

Our solution of the timetable is very simple. In the high school considered for the project there are ten subjects for both grade nine and grade ten. Loads are assigned to each subject teacher and a code is given for each teacher-subject combination. A simple search technique has been used during allocation of each teacher-subject code to a time slot. A database has been used to enforce constraints and to store data.

The prototype has been tested with data from Kokebe Tsebah Secondary School. It has been observed that the system successfully registers students, facilitates attendance recording by the home room teachers and generates various reports such as report card, transcript and a feasible timetable satisfying the constraints (requirements). It has also been shown that the system facilitates to view the status of students by their parents using the Internet or Intranet of the school. Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1 Background

Education system forms the backbone of every nation. And hence it is important to provide a strong educational foundation to the young generation to ensure the development of open-minded global citizens securing the future for everyone. Advanced technology available today can play a crucial role in streamlining education-related processes to promote solidarity among students, teachers, parents and the school staff.

Education is central to development. It is one of the most powerful instruments for reducing poverty and inequality and lays a foundation for sustained economic growth. With this aim currently our government has given special emphasis to the educational sector and school improvement activities such as continuous professional development for teachers, training and upgrading teachers and capacitating schools with manpower and materials are among the major actions which have been taken in both primary and secondary schools. In order to facilitate and simplify these actions one of the major tool is to have automated school management system.

School Management System(SMS) consists of tasks such as registering students, attendance record keeping to control absentees, producing report cards, producing official transcript, preparing timetable and producing different reports for teachers, parents, officials from kebele or kefle ketema education bureaus and other stakeholders.

Automation is the utilization of technology to replace human with a machine that can perform more quickly and more continuously [2]. By automating SMS documents that took up many large storage rooms can be stored on few disks. Transcript images can be annotated. It reduces the time to retrieve old transcripts from hours to seconds. However, the school system in the government schools of Addis Ababa is not automated and the record officers generate transcripts and reports manually and the school administrators use their experienced knowledge of miss and hit approaches to prepare timetables.

1.2 Statement of the Problem

To help promote students achievement and success, schools must have access to complete, accurate, and timely information about students. One of the benefits of automated SMS is that the student record system will simplify retrieval of required information and is a great instrument for school improvement by taking measures from the information acquired. Despite the use of automated SMS, the government schools in Addis Ababa are using paper based documentation system for performing various tasks and the school administrators apply their knowledge of hit and miss approach in scheduling classes and courses (preparing the timetable) which wastes manpower and much time unnecessarily that does not utilize the current technology.

Transcripts of students are prepared manually by the record officer and teachers. Report cards are produced by the home-room teachers. Attendance of students is recorded by the home-room teachers. In order to control absentees and know the number of days that a student has been absent from the school during the school days the attendance officer has to collect the attendance slips from the corresponding homeroom teachers and compile it which is also a time taking process. In addition to that retrieving records of students who have graduated couple of years ago has been a difficult task and the manual system also has difficulty of producing different reports which are required by the stakeholders such as teachers, administrators or officials from kebele and kifle-ketema.

Teachers may want to associate a student with his parent or emergency persons for disciplinary measures which need searching of the students record in the record office. It has been difficult to search a record from thousands of such records and observed that students can take any person claiming that he/she is their parent or emergency person which creates problem in control of students. Due to the inefficiency of the current manual system, the need arises to automate SMS in order to efficiently handle students’ attendance, to produce transcript, report cards and the various reports satisfying users and customers and to produce timetable which can schedule courses for teachers and classes of students.

1.3 Objective

The general and specific objectives of the project are described below:

1.3.1 General Objective

The general objective of the project is to automate the SMS.

1.3.2 Specific Objectives

In order to attain the general objective, the following list of specific objectives is set:

.. To develop an offline registration system,
.. To facilitate attendance record keeping,
.. To facilitate various report generation,
.. To allow teachers, parents, school community and Education bureau officials to view reports on students,
.. To produce a timetable
1.4 Organization of the Document

This report document contains seven chapters including this chapter. Chapter two defines and describes concepts with regard to SMS, aiming to give a general view to the reader of the document about tasks or activities which need automation in the school environment. Chapter three presents review of research works on SMS. In chapters four and five, we presented the analysis and design of the developed system respectively. In the remaining chapters, prototype development and conclusion and recommendations are briefly explained.

Chapter 2

Overview of the School Management System

This project emphasizes on school management system in Ethiopian secondary schools.
Therefore, we give an overview of the management system of secondary schools in Ethiopia.

2.1 Secondary School in Ethiopia

Secondary education follows eight years of primary education and is for children aged 14 and above. At the beginning of each academic year which starts in September (Ethiopian New Year), the students get registered and assigned rooms. Each class (section) of students is assigned to a fixed room. Home room teachers are assigned to each class of students. There are two semesters per year. The first semester final examination is usually administered during January, the second semester final examination is administered during the end of June and consequently the results of each class of students is collected, organized, ranked by the corresponding home room teacher and reported to each student. The homeroom teacher also records attendance of each student on each school day which is later organized by the attendance officer. A student who has been absent for more than twenty days is not allowed to take a semester final examination and will be forced to withdraw.

Transcripts are generated by the record officer. A student may request transcript when he/she wants to transfer to other school or when he/she has completed/graduated from the school and needs to join higher education or for some other purpose.

Officials from kebele and kifle-ketema education bureaus want to get statistical reports like number of registered students at the beginning of every year, number of drop outs, and number of passes/failures for each subject at the end of each semester as well as number of passes/failures at a grade level to help them participate in decision making.

2.2 The Timetabling Problem

School timetabling is a major administrative activity in any school. A number of subjects taught by the corresponding teachers are allocated into a number of available classrooms and a number of timeslots, subject to constraints.

The tasks that are considered in constructing the timetable are:

• Assigning periods to classes. There is a need to spread out lessons across the teaching cycle as much as possible, e.g. to avoid having 3 lessons on the same day.
• Some classes need 'double periods' (preferably 2 consecutive periods). This happens currently for Mathematics and English since each of the subjects have 6 lessons per week
(for five days) and therefore on one of the days these subjects should have two lessons for each class of students.

Some combinations of assignments lead to acceptable timetables, others do not. Such restrictions follow from conditions imposed by classes (rooms), students or teachers. We distinguish two types of conditions: conditions that must be met (requirements) and conditions that should be fulfilled as well as possible (desires) [5]. A class of students has a fixed room throughout the academic year and therefore we use class and room alternatively. Here a room is mentioned only when there are students in it.

The time tabling problem is said to be feasible if and only if it satisfies the following constraints
(requirements):

.. Every teacher and every class must be present in the timetable in a predefined number of periods; .. There can not be more than one teacher in the same class at the same period;
.. No teacher can be assigned to more than one class at the same time;
.. There can be no "uncovered periods" (that is, periods when no teacher has been assigned to a class).

Violation of the constraints leads to an infeasible solution which usually happens in the manual preparation of the timetable. Therefore, these constraints have to be satisfied in order to get a feasible solution.

2.2.1 Time Slot Assignment

The school timetabling is a weekly scheduling for all the classes of a school, avoiding teachers meeting two classes at the same time, and vice versa. This means that an event may be placed in the timetable only in such a way that it does not violate constraints.

Figure 2.1 shows the concepts of timetable construction at schools. Lessons in a subject are taught by a teacher to a corresponding class of students and the timetabling problem is a problem of allocating resources, i.e. assigning to teachers and class of students, time slots and lessons
[3, 4]. A time slot is a period and a lesson is an event associating a teacher, a subject and a class of students with in a time slot.

Figure 2.1 Concept of timetabling construction at schools

Timetabling is based on a rectangular time grid that divides the planning period into disjoint time intervals of equal duration (42 minutes in this case) which are called time slots or simply periods. Table 2.1 shows a typical time grid with one day (Monday) for all possible classrooms
(ri) and seven time slots a day.

Text Box: Lesson
Lesson
Teacher
Room Time Slot
Subject

Table 2.1 Timetable for one day (Monday) of the five days

.

r1

r2

r5

…..

rn

Monday

p1

e1

e22

e6

….

p2

e3

e5

e7

….

e9

p3

e8

e10

e15

….

e18

p4

e12

e34

e20

….

e11

p5

e32

e27

e24

….

e17

p6

e26

e19

e25

e23

p7

e28

e21

e29

…

e35

If there are m classes i=1,…,m, n teachers j=1,…,n, and T timeslots t=0,…,T-1., then the total number (rij) of lectures which is commonly called load of the teacher is known in advance. Each lecture takes one time slot.

Currently in the government high schools in Ethiopia, there are five school days from Monday to
Friday and there are seven periods per each school day. A time table for each class or teacher could be prepared on a grid as shown in table 2.2. A cell in the grid represents teacher and subject combination in the case of class/section time grid and the class that a teacher teaches in the case of a teacher time grid.

Table 2.2 Typical time grid with five days and seven time slots a day

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

p1

p2

p3

p4

p5

p6

p7

The lectures are activities and teachers and classes are resources. These resources are not available at certain time periods. A lecture can be given in period t only if the corresponding class and teacher are available in t [1]. All lectures have equal processing length, i.e. the length of the period and have to be scheduled without preemption.

To automate the school activities some literature reviews have been done. The literature reviews is discussed in chapter 3.

Chapter 3

Literature Review

Automated SMS plays a great role in simplifying the job of employees at the school and satisfying the need of customers and stakeholders of the school. Even though no documentation is found in Ethiopia to be reviewed, products have been observed at some schools to help understand the problem of managing schools and handling school data. This chapter reviews these products.

3.1 Observed Products

In the year 2003 City Government of Addis Ababa Education Bureau (CGAAEB) was very much interested to have automated school management system to get uniform and quick access to the students’ data for administrative purpose on promoting the students’ achievement and related issues. The bureau has selected Wundrad Preparatory School for pilot test. At the time the school principals together with officials from CGAAEB signed a contractual agreement with some software developer company. The developers installed their first version of the product which can register a student offline and generate official transcript with some level of difficulty. As the system is not fully automated, it does not support management of attendance, does not support generating report cards and other important functions such as generating school timetable and a web based report for parents. Due to the lack of follow up by the government officials at
CGAAEB, the company was unable to complete the project. The school currently is unable to use the partially developed system because of lack of trained person and lack of hardware and software maintenance.

Another product that is in use is transcript generator system. The transcript generator system at
Menelik II Preparatory School generates official transcript of students. In order to generate transcript the record officer enters the student information along with the grade marks for the grades completed per year and per semester. Then the system generates the required official transcript. Currently the school is using the system to generate official transcript even though the data entry format has unnecessarily many fields which are not applicable for the record office but can be used for continuous assessment by the course teacher.

3.2 Manual Timetabling

Manual timetables are prepared by dedicated teachers. In manual timetabling, it is common to proceed in an iterative fashion where each iteration selects and schedules a lesson [3]. Scheduling a lesson requires to choose a classroom (fixed for each section of students) and a time slot such that the commitment to the choice will not violate any constraint.

In school timetabling, we are required to schedule a given set of meetings such that the resulting timetables are feasible and acceptable to all people involved. Humans are able to prepare the timetable using some hit/miss approach. So it is possible to automate the timetable based on a simulation of the human way of solving the problem. Such techniques, that we call direct heuristics, were based on a successive augmentation. That is, a partial timetable is extended, lecture by lecture, until all lectures have been scheduled. The underlying idea of all approaches is to schedule the most constrained lecture first.

Usually some responsible teachers are assigned to schedule subjects and teachers. The number of teachers available per each subject is predefined and the load that each teacher has is calculated.
With these data the timetable constructor assigns each teacher-subject association to the appropriate classes with the available time slots.

The manual solution of the timetabling problem usually requires many person-days of work. In addition, the solution obtained may be unsatisfactory. The lessons should be fairly distributed satisfying the identified constraints.

3.3 Drawbacks of the Reviewed Systems

The reviews described have the following problems:

• Generate official transcript with some level of difficulty,
• Do not sufficiently produce the required reports to allow parents to view status of their children and reports for officials of kebele and kifle-ketema to help them participate in decision making,

• Do not generate timetable for the schools
• Do not facilitate attendance record keeping by the homeroom teachers

This project work tries to fill the gap by automating the various activities at schools. It tries to satisfy customers need and simplify the works of administrators, record officer and teachers.
With an automated school management system parents can easily interact with the school community to follow up their children’s achievement and play their role in the school development processes.

Chapter 4

System Analysis

In this chapter the functional and non-functional requirements of the system are described and modeled using UML models.

4.1 Functional Requirements

The functional requirements of the system are:

• register a student,
• record attendance of students,
• generate various reports,
• generate timetable.
4.2 Non Functional Requirements

Security requirements are important factors in this system as classified data will be stored in the database. User validation will be done during login to insure that the user is valid and that the user is valid and that the user only has access to his or her permission data. General users will only have access through the user interface.

The system will have consistent interface formats and button sets for all forms in the application, will have a form based interface for all data entry and viewing formats, and will generate reports that are formatted in a table and that should look like the existing manual report formats for user friendliness. The system will be easily maintained by the developer or other authorized trained person and it shall respond as fast as possible in generating report and producing the timetable.

4.3 Analysis Model

To produce a model of the system which is correct, complete and consistent we need to construct the analysis model which focuses on structuring and formalizing the requirements of the system.
Analysis model contains three models: functional, object and dynamic models. The functional model can be described by use case diagrams. Class diagrams describe the object model.
Dynamic model can also be described in terms of sequence, state chart and activity diagrams. For the purpose of this project we have described the analysis model in terms of the functional model and dynamic models using use case and sequence diagrams.

4.3.1 Use case Diagram

Use cases of the system are identified to be “RegisterStudent”, “RecordAttendance”,
“GenerateTranscript”, “GenerateReportCard”, “ViewReport” and “ProduceTimetable”. The diagram depicted in Figure 4.1 shows the use case diagram of the system.

RegisterStudentRecordOfficerRegisterStudentGenerateTranscrip

tGenerateReportCardUpdateRecordHomeRoomTeacherRecordAttendan

ceParen
OfficialAdminViewReportGenerateTimetableFigure 4.1 Use Case Diagram of the SMS 4.3.2 Actor Description

Name: RecordOfficer

Description: A RecordOfficer is a person who registers a student, input, update student data and produce transcript and report card.

Name: HomeRoomTeacher

Description: A HomeRoomTeacher is a teacher assigned by the school director to each class of students to follow the students closely. He/She has the responsibility of recording attendance of students and submitting.

Name: Parent

Description: A Parent is a person who is registered as parent of the student and responsible to follow the student in close contact with the school. He/She can view the status of the student such as attendance and result/performance of the student online.

Name: Official

Description: An Official is a person who is registered as a legal concerned official from kebele or kifle-ketema to get reports on students of the school. He/She will be viewing the report online.

Name: Admin

Description: Admin is a person who is responsible to produce the timetable for each teacher and classroom by providing the necessary parameters.

4.3.3 Use Case Description

Name: RegisterStudent

Actors: RecordOfficer

Description: To register some one as a student of the school

Precondition: A student has to be eligible (has to be from the pre-specified junior schools that the school will accept)

Flow of Event:

(1) student wants to be registered as a student of the school
(2) Record officer verifies that the student is eligible
(3) Registration form will be given to the student
(4) The student completes the registration form that contains student’s full name, address, parent name, emergency person names and addresses and other detail information.
(5) RecordOfficer of the school checks whether the contents of the registration form is properly completed
(6) RecordOfficer fills and submits the form to the system
(7) System registers
(8) Use case ends

Post Condition: Student Registered

Name: RecordAttendance

Actors: HomeRoomTeacher

Description: To record attendance of students in each school day

Precondition: A home room teacher must login as the home room teacher of the class to record attendance

Flow of Event:

(1) A home room teacher wants to record absentees from the class
(2) The home room teacher fills in the attendance slip in the class room
(3) Having the attendance slip the home room teacher logs in to record
(4) HomeRoomTeacher records absentees and submits
(5) System acknowledges
(6) Use case ends
Alternative Flow of Events
Alternative flow A: User is not a home room teacher of the class
A3. User can’t record attendance for the required class of students
A4. Use case ends

Name: GenerateReportCard

Actors: RecordOfficer

Description: To produce a report card for students per semester

Precondition: A student must have complete grade marks in all subjects of the semester

Flow of Events:

(1) The record officer logs in and selects the class/section to which the student belongs
(2) The record officer searches the student from the class/section based on the search criteria defined (3) The system processes the report card
(4) System displays and print the result

(5) Use case ends
Alternative Flow of Events
Alternative flow A: The user logged in is not the record officer
A1. User can not generate report card
A2. Use case ends
Alternative flow B: The student is incomplete at least in one subject
B3. The system can not generate the report card.
B4. Use case ends

Name: GenerateTranscript

Actors: RecordOfficer

Description: To produce transcript based on the request of a student

Precondition: A student must have completed at least a semester to have grade report

Flow of Event:

(1) A student wants to get transcript
(2) The record officer logs in and searches the students record from the database based on the search criteria
(3) The system processes the transcript
(4) System displays and print the result
(5) Use case ends
Alternative Flow of Events
Alternative flow A: The student is incomplete at least in one subject