VALLEY VIEW UNIVERSITY

(Techiman Campus)

SCHOOL MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM

By

Aka Mizan Assouan Stphane (ID: 211IT01000008)

October 2013

1. Introduction
Education system can be considered as the number one factor for development in the world. That is the reason why it is crucial to provide a strong educational foundation to the young generation. Advanced information technology available today can play a vital role in simplifying education-related processes to promote easy interaction among students, teachers, parents and the school staff. Currently the government is now putting more emphasizes on the educational sector by training and upgrading teachers, building more schools facilities, sponsoring brilliant student to further their education and more action which have been undertaken in both primary and secondary schools. In order to facilitate and simplify these actions one of the basic tool is to have an automated school management system. Automation is the utilization of technology to replace human with a machine that can perform more quickly and more continuously (W. Erben, August 2000). By automating the school management information system, documents that take up large storage rooms can be stored on a single personal computer. It reduces the time to retrieve old transcripts from hours to seconds. However, the school system used in most of the governmental and private schools in Ghana is not automated, all transcripts and reports are manually generated and the school administrators use their experienced knowledge of trial and error approaches to prepare timetables.

1.1 Subject and Field of Study

Information technology can be simply defined has the study of the use of technology to improve information dissemination and handling. This decade, Information technology has made so many impacts in areas like military, health, engineering, education etc. For example in the educational sector, information technology has made a huge impact through the introduction of the School Management Information System (SMIS). SMIS is a process in which tasks such as registering students, keeping attendance record to detect absentees, producing official transcript, preparing timetable and producing different reports for teachers, parents, the schools administration and other stakeholders are undertaken.

1.2 Study Objectives

The general and specific objectives of the project are described below:
1.2.1 Global (General) Objectives

The general objective of the project is to develop an automated SMIS.

1.2.2 Specific Objectives

In order to attain the general objective, the following list of specific objectives is set: To allow teachers, administrations and other stakeholder to view reports on students, To develop an offline registration system, To help check imbalances of accounts, To automatically generate timetable, To generate payroll for staff.

1.3 Background to the Study

To assist or insure the accomplishment and success of students; schools must have access to absolute, reliable, accurate, and timely (real-time) information about students. One of the benefits of automated SMIS is that the student record system will simplify retrieval of required or needed information. It is a great instrument for school improvement because it empowers the school management team to take accurate decisions based on the information acquired (Degif Teka, June 2008). Notwithstanding the use of automated SMIS, Techiman Business College (TBC) is using paper based documentation system for performing various tasks and the school administrators apply their knowledge of trial and error approach in scheduling classes and courses (preparing the timetable). 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 spot 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 them, 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 stakeholders such as teachers, administrators or bureaucrats of Techiman Business College (TBC). In special cases were the attentions of students parents are needed for an urgent action to be taken; It has been difficult to search for the student in concern records from thousands of such records, and also observed that students takes any person claiming that he/she is their parent or emergency person which creates problem in the management of students.

1.4 Scope of Study

This project aims to develop a SMIS for Techiman Business College (Brong-Ahafo, Ghana). Hence the geographical scope of this project is the TBC college grounds. Although this is considered as a prototype model, the project can be extended later to build full school information management
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process system for institutions of high learning such as universities, colleges, polytechnics and so forth.

1.5 Justification of the Study/Significance of Study

After a survey, it was realize that there is a lot of dissatisfaction with current approaches in administering Techiman Business College in the area of human resource management, report generation, accountancy, mode of information dissemination and management decision taking. Due to the lack of inefficiency using the current manual system, the need arises to automate the SMIS in order to efficiently handle students attendance, to produce transcript, report cards and the various reports satisfying users and to produce a timetable system generator which can schedule courses for teachers and classes of students.

1.6 Methodology
To develop a web based application management system, it will be necessary to use two types of methodology namely research methodology and software engineering development methodology. The research methodology will be done through questionnaire administration and interview conduction of potential stakeholders of the system to acquire their needs. The second methodology will be applied for the development of a prototype. At this stage, Prototyping Model will be used to develop this application. The Prototyping model is a technique for quickly building a function but incomplete model of the information system. The system will be developed using PHP as the front-end and MySQL as the back-end.

1.7 Expected Results of the Study & Possible Use (Research/Study Deliverables)
This project is to demonstrate that the implementation of the SMIS in Techiman Business College will improve quality of services, and also control and automate the information system process. In other words, the introduction of an automated student report generation, a tool design to check imbalances of accounts, an automated timetable generation feature, an easy to use registration system and a function to automatically generate payroll for staff that will be developed at the end of the project should ease the information management process of Techiman Business College.

1.8 Presentation of Thesis (Chapter-by-Chapter Summary of Thesis)

The complete report document will contain seven chapters including this chapter (General Introduction). Chapter two will present review of research works on SMIS. Chapter three will define
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and describe concepts with regard to SMIS, aiming to give a general view to the reader of the document about tasks or activities which need automation in the school environment. Chapter four and five will present the analysis and design of the system to be developed respectively. In the remaining chapters, prototype development of the system, the system documentation, the conclusion and recommendations will be briefly explained.

1.9 Study Work Plan (Timelines)

November Literature Review Crystallization of the Research Problem Analysis of the Proposed System Detailed design of the Proposed System System Implementation and Testing System Documentation December January February March April

Literature Review & Crystallization of the Research Problem:

These two phases of the project will be done simultaneously to quickly acquire enough facts to make a proper analysis of the proposed system. Data will be gathered from potential stakeholders of the system and online literature. Because of its importance the first five (5) weeks will be dedicated for its completion starting from November 2013.
Analysis of the Proposed System:

After getting more facts concerning the system from the case study and also other publication concerning the SMIS, critical analysis will be made, and then an alternative solution will be proposed. This phase will take one month to be completed.

 Detailed design of the Proposed System

From what was returned from the analysis stage, a detailed design on how the proposed system will be built with all its features will be conducted. This phase will be done within five (5) weeks.
System Implementation and Testing

This is where the actual development of the system (or prototype) will be undertaken with also error detection and solving. This phase is the most complex part so it will require two (2) months to be completed.
System Documentation

After everything is done, a detailed and easy to understand manual or tutorial on how the new system should be used. This phase will start basically during the testing phase and should be completed by April 2013.