DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A MOBILE BASED STUDY PLANNER FOR STUDENTS

1.1 Introduction

A study plan is an organized schedule that students create to outline time for study and learning goals. Just like with work or school schedules, university students should develop a study schedule where they can synchronies their everyday life with studying. Creating a study plan not only helps the user become more organized, but it also holds them accountable for their own learning outcomes (Scouller, 2001). In this age where there are many distractions e.g. video games, social networks etc. and people easily lose track of time a study plan is even more important for success in the university, since a student needs to have self-discipline and determination to complete their studies without the constant reminders of a teacher.

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

A study plan is an effective way to help students navigate through their education in an organized way. Every student will develop a different study plan; there is no correct study plan for everyone. In creating a personalized study plan, the student will need to do some self-evaluation of their current schedule, finding days when they have fewer personal commitments when they can squeeze some study time. Each student studies differently, so the amount of time needed for studying will differ amongst classmates. Some students find that studying nightly for two hours is more realistic than studying a few times a week for a longer period of time.

Since smartphones are now peoples companions and 94% of students own smartphones. (Ifeanyi, et al., 2014).Creating an app that helps students study, manage their time is a legitimate idea as it solves a particular need of students and people generally. According to (Truluck and Renne, 2002) a study plan is a method and system for setting up and using a personal learning schedule and path through an instructional product. Using a wizard-style interface, a study plan is established for a user based on a session frequency, along with the date the user wishes to finish the instructional product. Once the user has set up a study plan, each time that user logs in, the user is taken to that day’s list of assigned activities on a personalized home page. From there, the user is able to check activity status for past and future lessons, and quickly navigate to a lesson. Users can set up their own personalized learning schedule based on their own study objectives.

Students need to identify learning goals for each study session in order to maximize these scheduled study times, by determining why they are studying, and develop a plan that can help them achieve those goals. The study plan takes into consideration upcoming tests, average in certain courses, and projects/courses that will take more time than others.

This study is driven towards merging efficient time management and organizing schedules with recent technological explosions in mobile computing. Aimed at developing a study planner for android devices because, currently android devices are the most popular in the world today, with 28% of smartphone users with android devices, while the iPhone accounts for 25% (Pew Research Centre, 2013). Android powers hundreds of millions of devices in over 190 countries worldwide. Also four in every ten people using android are between the ages of 18 and 34 (age range for university students) (The Smartphone Consumer, 2012). This project takes advantage of this statistics i.e. The popularity of android to procure a solution to the problem stated above.

The challenges encountered that led to the execution of the research work is as a result of the problem of bulky, enormous and confusing study planner or timetable has been a challenge for a while now in many tertiary institution (Nakano et al, 2010). The results showed that 63% of students surveyed do not copy their timetable, while 17% of the few who copy the timetable, copy the wrong thing. Most often students tend to forget tasks and assignments given to them because most times they have lots of assignments from different lectures to do. This is in addition to other extracurricular activities. Also, students are not aware of activities to be done during the semester well ahead of the event occurrence. The idea behind this project is to address these challenges. The copying of timetable problem usually arises at the beginning of every semester when the students need to copy their lecture timetable, or during test and examination week when they students need to get their timetable. On the other hand, the issue of assignments and task reminder occur often, as different lecturers tend to give assignment at different times during the semester.

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1.3 Statement of Problem

Investigation revealed the major problem with students and people in general is efficient time management, i.e. maximize time to achieve results. Another problem is remembering things which have been planned e.g. so many students forget what lectures they have for the day, what assignments, quizzes, reports are due for submission. The traditional solution has been to write down these things in diary or book of some sort but this is faced with the challenge of loss, damage, and also forgetfulness.

Smartphones provide a valid solution to this problem as people hardly forget their phones information can be backed up and stored(most recently cloud storage) so even in the case of theft information can still be recovered.

Designing an app for a phone which helps people do what they normally would have done in their diary, and even the phone reminding them of events forgotten is an effective solution to this problem.

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1.4 Aim and Objectives of the Study

The aim of the study is to design and implement a Mobile Based Study Planner for Students. In achieving this aim, the following specific objectives were laid out as follows:

1. To study existing study planner applications.
2. To design an android application that will help students efficiently manage their study time
3. To develop an android application that will provide an effective way for students to log their lecture days and times, and seamlessly add reminders to lectures which have tests, assignments or report due etc.

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1.5 Significance of Study

This study is important because it will help students manage their time and to plan their day, focus on their studies and still get on with their normal lives, ensuring that they do not forget about important tests, assignments, reports, and other activities. The following are the specific relevance of the proposed system:

1. Reduced scope for error: students will be able to get appropriate information rather than relying on third parties who might not copy the correct timetable.
2. Focus on the student: creates personalized electronic timetable for the students
3. Ease of data viewing: it allows the students to focus on the data that is relevant to them
4. Reminders: it also allows students to set remainders for due assignments and project.

This study will also be of immense benefit to other researchers who intend to know more on this study and can also be used by non-researchers to build more on their research work. This study contributes to knowledge and could serve as a guide for other study.

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1.6 Scope of Study

The scope of the research is focused on the Design and Implementation of Mobile Based Study Planner for Students. This project aims at creating a study planner for android devices that will increase student’s productivity in study, it is based on theory that effective time management leads to greater productivity. This is achieved by allowing them create and manage their study plans on their phones, record their class time tables. The database saves this information which can then be used to trigger a reminder for the user.

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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

Database design: The process of creating a design that will support emprise mission statement and mission required database e system.

Software: These are program for computer which allows certain specific task to be accomplished e.g. word process etc.