DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF COMPUTER BASED COURSE ALLOCATION SYSTEM FOR UNIVERSITIES

1.1 Introduction

The online course allocation system for academy lecturer is being developed to provide ease handling on courses given to lecturers. A lot of issue has been developed due to the manual allocation method which is been carried out manually using paper and pen from the lecturer in charge of course allocation. 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 course allocation 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 output of a list stated for lecturers on their preferred course.

As a prelude to other parts of this study, this chapter will discuss the background upon which this study was initiated, the statement of problems that led to this study, the Aim and Objectives of the study. Others are Significance of the study, Scope of work, Limitations of the Study and Definition of technical terms.

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1.2 Background of Study

The university course allocation problems deal with the scheduling of the teaching program. Two different but related problems arise in this context. One is to schedule courses and the other is to schedule examinations in the most efficient way. Course allocation problems have attracted the continuous interest of researchers mainly because they provide the opportunity of testing combinatorial solution methods in formulations that represent difficult practical problems. In most of the attempted solutions of either the course or examination problem, the objective is to and a feasible schedule. A feasible schedule is one that satisfies the teaching or examination requirements, respectively. These requirements appear usually as explicit constraints in the IP formulation while additional case specific constraints arise as a result of the particular institution’s rules, administrative policies and pre-specified preferences. Constructing a feasible schedule is a difficult problem whenever there is a scarcity of classrooms and increased ¯flexibility in the student’s choices.

A more difficult problem is to produce a good feasible schedule. A good (or fair) schedule is one that has convenient relative time positions of the courses or examinations corresponding to every group of students following the same compulsory courses, that is, a compact schedule. In the present study, these requirements are faced by properly structuring the problem and by using suitable objective function coefficients in the IP formulation.

The present study describes the development of a system producing good (or fair) course timetable schedules. There are different departments in a University, each one including different specializations. The academic year is divided into two independent semesters (winter and spring) each containing completely different courses. To facilitate the construction of a fair schedule, the university administration supports the construction of a conflict free schedule only for certain university streams. A university stream is a set of compulsory and optional courses suggested by the administration to be followed by the students in each one of the eight semesters Murray et al (2015).

University course allocation is a large resource allocation problem, in which both times and rooms are determined for each class meeting. Significant research has been devoted to Curriculum-Based Course allocation in particular, because of its importance for universities worldwide. Due to the difficulty and size of modern timetabling problems, much of the literature proposes purely heuristic solution methods. However, in recent years, integer programming (IP) methods have been the subject of increased attention.

One decomposition used in course timetabling is to generate a timetable first, followed by a classroom assignment second. This is commonly used in practice because the time elements of a timetable involve complex institution-specific requirements, over which experienced administrators and teaching staff would like to maintain control. In some institutions, the classroom assignment problem is the only part of constructing a timetable which uses computer-aided decision making. Most older formulations of the classroom assignment problem use a simple measure of quality which allows each time period to be considered independently. These formulations can be modelled as an assignment problem, which can be solved in polynomial time. More recent formulations are able to address complex measures of quality which cause interdependencies between time periods, such as providing the same room for all classes from the same course (Lach & Lubbecke, 2012).

Moreover, they should be getting less courses to be lectured. Due to this issue happening in Universities, the researcher has developed a proposed system to help aid course allocation within lecturers. This project consist are system which handles the allocation of the courses for the lecturers according to their expertise and their position. It also minimizes the courses given to the higher position lecturers. This system also user friendly and ease the work of the admin office to provide the lecturers their preferable courses.

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1.3 Statement of Problems

The current course management allocation system for academy staff is being done manually which causes inaccuracy on the number of courses given for the lecturer. Other than that, lecturers could not get the preferred course according to their expertise. Lastly, the courses are difficult to manage according to the changes. The following problems exist:

1. Absence of an automated system to capture and store course allocation records.
2. Inability to easily update course allocation records.
3. Difficulty in obtaining reports pertaining to course allocation records.

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1.4 Aim and Objectives of the Study

The aim of the study is to Design and Implement a Computer Based Course Allocation System for Universities using University of Uyo as a case study. In achieving this aim, the following specific objectives were laid out as follows to develop an application software that will:

1. Handle the course allocation for lecturers on their preferred course according to their expertise.
2. Easily manage course allocation records and avoid conflicts in course allocation.
3. Provide access for the lecturers to view on the courses assigned; and
4. Create a system for the administrators to access or log in and make changes on the courses.

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1.5 Significance of Study

The significance of the study is that it will enable the management of the university to efficiently allocate courses. It will be more flexible that the manual system and easy to use and update course allocation details. It will ensure smooth running of lectures in the institution. The system is developed to ease the allocation of academy work for the academy semester. This system is also giving priority for the lecturers on the expertise field courses to be lectured for the students who registered the courses on the semester. The system will also serve as a useful reference material to other researchers seeking for information on the subject.

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1.6 Scope of Study

The scope of this research is focused on the Design and Implementation of Departmental Course Allocation System for universities using University of Uyo, in Akwa Ibom state as a case study.

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1.7 Limitations of the Study

During the course of this study, many things militated against its completion, some of which are:

1. Time Constraint: The time frame given to accomplish this project was very short due to school academic calendar and it was carried out under pressure which made the researcher not to implement some necessary features.
2. Establishment Policies: Establishment policies posed a serious limitation as most staffs are not ready to release information needed for this project work. There were lots of information needed from the staffs of this institution to enhance the study which took them time to release or they did not release at all for security purposes, hence the scope was reduced.
3. Research material: availability of research material is a major setback to the scope of the study.
4. Frequent power failure: This made the researcher append more money on fuel to ensure sustainable power.
5. Financial Constraint: Insufficient fund tends to impede the efficiency of the researcher in sourcing for the relevant materials, literature or information and in the process of data collection (internet).

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1.8 Definition of Terms

Manually: By hand rather than automatically or electronically

Administrator: A person who acts as the administrator for an Internet or type of computer user with administrative privileges.