Student Enrollment system

Team“AKI”

“Student Enrolment System”

Table of Contents

Abstract

The rapid technology development has contributed leaps and bounds to almost all the categories of the industry and education sector is not an exception here. Schools, colleges and universities have started using the technology in the wide range of services that they provide to their students. In all the institutions; enrolment period is always has been their toughest time throughout the year; especially for those who have manual process of enrolment. Student enrolments play a significant role as poor management of this system can hinder the overall operations of the institution.
Thus to overcome this, number of student enrolment systems came into existence but all of them varies for different institutions. We, as a team have developed a student enrolment system for Enlighten International College. The report documents the development and implementation of this newlybuilt student enrolment system.
The system collects and stores the needed information from the students and makes it available for them as well as for the college staff in a more faster and convenient way. This enrolment system will store the files of all the student enrollees in a central repository from where they can be accessed anytime; lessening the overhead of the enrolment staff to do this process manually every now and then.
Taking time and budget into consideration; we decided to develop the required enrolment system in Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com enabled us to develop the application with no upfront costs and provides the platform and environment for effective application generation.

Keywords
There are number of keywords that are used throughout in the report as well as in the system:
Student
Enrolment
Courses
Administrator
Application Status
Application Introduction
Overview: Enlighten International College

Enlighten International College is an old and well renowned college established in Sydney. Students from all around the world come to study here. Enlighten offers a range of accredited courses in different streams of education sectors namely: Arts, IT, Engineering, Law, and Biology. Enlighten’s foundation was laid by Dr. William McBride in 1985 and since then the college has been imparting education to hundreds of students every year.
As every college has a certain procedure for the students’ intakes, so do Enlighten as well. They used to have a manual paper-based enrolment process but now they are planning to move to the new computerized enrolment process. Also to acknowledge or to contact the student about their enrolment status, the college staff has to either ring them up or to post mail to them. So, to overcome these problems; Enlighten has asked to develop a web application for their student enrolments which they would likely deploy in the forthcoming semester. After looking at their requirements, time and budget; we decided to go ahead with the development of the application through Salesforce.com which will deliver excellent results in much shorter span of time than any other platforms available in the market.

Problems/Solution prior to the PaaS Implementation

There were many problems that the college used to face and had their own ways to deal with those problems before the application was deployed. These were:

Time Consuming and Error Prone:Enlighten’s whole operations were paper based and was done manually by its staff. Even for the enrolments, they had paper forms and students had to submit those forms to get them assessed waiting in long queues for massive amount of time. These processes used to take very long time and had scope for error, thus were not suffice.

Thesolution for this problem was to contact the students via different media like posting letters or calling them but that is time consuming and error prone (respectively) as well.

Students had to provide their details twice: The students had to fill up their details in the application forms first and then when they used to get selected, they again had to fill up the same details in the enrolment form; which created a lot of hassle for the students as well as the staff.

These problems had no strong solution, as both the forms were different and had different eligibility criteria. The only thing that could be done was to assess the documents the same day of application and if they meet the criteria then ask the students to fill up the enrolment form simultaneously that used to save their time.

Data Backups:Earlier, all the students’ data was on paper and that was the only backup of their records for the college to keep. So, if in case some paper used to get lost somehow or they got damaged due to any circumstances, used to create fuss for the college.

The only solution to this problem was to recollect all of the data from the students, which was again time consuming and increases overhead for both of them.

Authentication from top Hierarchies: In order to approve an application and to enroll a student, the admin staff has to seek the permissions from the people of different levels of hierarchy. This is also a time consuming process requiring more efforts of the staff

The temporary solution for this problem was to set-up criteria as per the norms defined by the top hierarchies to evaluate the application so that even the admin staff can assess and approve/disapprove an application. But still the important decisions of any kind are in the hands of people in the top hierarchy. Even this has a further emerging problem that to do these activities, the college requires more staff and resources, thus escalating the expenses and the cost of operation.

So, to overcome all these problems; Enlighten’s management has decided to computerize all their student enrolment activities. This will not only help Enlighten but also the future students wishing to get admitted into the university.

Rationale/Business Case for PaaS Implementation

The rationale or business case of this system explains the needs and offers potential solutions to the existing problems. This can be achieved by deploying an effective enrolment system that caters and manages all these above stated problems.
The benefits that Enlighten would be getting after deploying this student enrolment system are:

The college will be having more number of completed applications and enrolled students.
Track any student’s information whenever needed by college.
This would save enrolment cost per student.
This would help updating student information without any assistance.
No set up cost of the software as all information is put in the cloud.
Low maintenance cost for the online enrolment system.
Creation/updating/deletion of any record is just few minutes away from the admin of university.
This will strengthen the university stature and will make university keep its pace with the new technology.

System Modeling

Data Model

The diagram given below shows the data model for Enlighten International College. The data model diagram below represents the relationship between the various custom objects. Both the master-detail and lookup relationship are shown in the data diagram.

User Profiles (Role Hierarchies)

There are many different roles are in the university. The next diagram shows the hierarchies between all the various roles.

Custom Profiles

Director

Director is accountable for managing of day to day affairs of the Enlighten International College. He has total access to all the data of the college. Screenshots below show the tab settings and various permissions given to the profile.

Dean

Dean has significant authority. He manages all the various units of the college. Screenshots below show the tab settings and various permissions given to the profile.

Head of Department

Head of Departments heads a specific unit in the college. There are various units in the college such as Educational (Engineering, IT, Arts, Law), Accounting, and Human Resources etc. Screenshots below show the tab settings and various permissions given to the profile.

Enrolment Officer

Enrolment officer handles all the various enrolments of the college. There are around 20 Enrolment officers, which handle the enrolment process of the college. Enrolment officer ensure that all enrolment processes meet requirements under the SET Quality Framework and Sydney Training Guarantee (STG). Screenshots below show the tab settings and various permissions given to the profile.

Instructor

These are the various Lecturers tutoring in the college. The lecturers report to their respective head of departments. Screenshots below show the tab settings and various permissions given to the profile.

Student

Screenshots below show the tab settings and various permissions given to the profile.

Process Flow Diagram
This shows the workflow as to how the process of student enrolment happens:

Screen Walkthrough

Student Screen

This is the screen available to students to fill out their personal details.

Validations:

Date of Birth

This validation is done so that correct date of birth is entered in the field. The validation here verifies that the DOB given is before 2001. Considering the factor that student with less age then this can’t be admitted.

Phone Number:

The contact number given needs to be a number and also it should be 10 digits long.

Marks Validation:

The marks obtained should be in less than 100 as that is not feasible.

Student Home Screen

The screen displays all the students which have registered.

Enrolment Screen:

This the screen managed by the enrolment officer. All the various students are assessed and then they are enrolled for a particular course as shown below.

Enrolment Home Screen:

This screen displays all the various students which are enrolled in the college.

Courses:

This screen enables the higher authorities to update the various courses available in the college. Students can then register for these courses.

Courses Home Screen:

All the various courses, which are available in the college, are shown in the figure. Student can select any of the courses given below:

Application Rejection Email Screen:

The screenshot shows the mails sent to the student by the administrator on rejection.

Email Template:

Application Acceptance Email Screen:

The screenshot shows the mails sent to the student by the administrator on acceptance of the application.

Email Template:

Task

Assessing Students:

This is a task workflow which shows the task that when a student enters his/her details a mail is forwarded to the enrolment officer so as to check the credentials of the student.

Time Based Workflow:

Conclusion and Future Work

Conclusion

PaaS gives an opportunity to abolish all the hassles of the application development and at the same time it allows the developers to develop and implement the applications without worrying for anything else.
Working on Salesforce-PaaS environment enabled us to get the required system faster than we could have built on any other platform like Java or .Net; it alsodid not require any tuning or installation of database, application server etc.
Force.com has great built-in features and components that ease the application development process. It’s all about 80% clicks and 20% coding and also all your coding is your own unique Intellectual Property. The workflow approvals and notifications were easy. Appropriate access can be given to different profiles, this can be done at both; field or object level. Most importantly, usually in other web applications environment; we have to set-up the application environment, but in case of Force.com, it’s ready to go and accessibleeverywhere.

Future Works

It is worthwhile to encapsulate that this system has in many ways being very educative. As every project has scope for further research, improvement and development; this enrolment system can also be extended to further upgrade its efficacy. We would like to add:

Student Fee and financing details: This will store all the financial details of the students and will notify them if their feedeposit dates are coming closer or have already passed.

Smartphones Accessible: We would make a smartphone version of the same application that would allow the students to access and apply for their choice of courses anywhere, anytime and with the same ease.

Learning Resources: We would like to integrate this feature for the students (who are already enrolled) to access the subject documents for their chosen subjects. This would help them in collecting and maintaining their all the subject documents at one place.

Classes and Timetables: This addition would benefit students to let them know the timetables and their class schedules prior to the commencement of the course on this same application. Currently, the students either get the mails for their classes from their respective course instructors or they have to walk-in to check it.

References

‘Examples of validation rules’, viewed on 24 May 2014, https://help.salesforce.com/HTViewHelpDoc?id=fields_useful_field_validation_formulas.htm.
Hussain F., Lab Solutions, viewed on 22 May 2014, https://online.uts.edu.au/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_19799_1%26url%3D.
Taft D.K., 2009, ‘Salesforce.com 's Force.com Is Five Times Faster than Java, .NET’, viewed on 22 May 2014.
2014, ‘Enrolment Step by Step Guide’, university of south Australia, viewed on 24 May 2014.
Owen H., Henderson D., Mintoff J., Nolon P., 1985,’Student Enrolment System’, Department of computing science working paper series, page 10-45, viewed on 24 May 2014.
Hussain F., Lecture material (week 7-11), UTS online, accessed on 20 May 2014.

References: ‘Examples of validation rules’, viewed on 24 May 2014, https://help.salesforce.com/HTViewHelpDoc?id=fields_useful_field_validation_formulas.htm. Hussain F., Lab Solutions, viewed on 22 May 2014, https://online.uts.edu.au/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_19799_1%26url%3D. Taft D.K., 2009, ‘Salesforce.com 's Force.com Is Five Times Faster than Java, .NET’, viewed on 22 May 2014. 2014, ‘Enrolment Step by Step Guide’, university of south Australia, viewed on 24 May 2014. Owen H., Henderson D., Mintoff J., Nolon P., 1985,’Student Enrolment System’, Department of computing science working paper series, page 10-45, viewed on 24 May 2014. Hussain F., Lecture material (week 7-11), UTS online, accessed on 20 May 2014.