Design And Implementation Of Automated Online Course Allocation System For Lecturers

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 each containing completely different courses. 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 four semesters.

Course allocation is a combinatorial assignment problem that assigns lecturers to courses, given lecturers’ preferences over course schedules. Unfortunately, any strategy proof and efficient mechanism for this problem must be dictatorial with poor outcomes. (Mike Ruberry & Scott Duke Kominers2013)

Course allocation is the problem of allocating seats in university courses among students. Many universities impose an upper bound on the number of students allowed to register to each course, in order to ensure that the teachers can give sufficient attention to each individual student. Since the demand for some courses is higher than the upper bound, a natural question is which students should be allowed to register to each course.(Wikipedia)

Hence, the efficiency of an organization or establishment would be achieved if they embark on computer based system. However, using the computer based system in place of the manual system will make the practical insinuation of high technology. This will minimize the time needed for processing of departmental course and attend to other subsequent information needed by the management system. The importance of this project is so prominent with the current state of processing the departmental course and suggest a complete efficient and reliable approach that will be of immense benefit to most higher institutions in general especially to the Federal College Of Animal Health And Production Technology. Actually, this would go a long way to improve their service by exposing and creating awareness of computer applications.

1.1 BACKGROUND OF STUDY

Institutions across the country are having a constraint on course allocations for the lecturers by using manual allocation process, which is relatively slow and increases delay in academy process. It effects the lecturer’s field which they have done the majoring studies on it. Every lecturer is having their preferable course to be lectured for the student under that course registered by them on the current semester. Some lecturers also doing their research in the time of their work, due to manual allocation of courses it affects their research timing. Some lecturers are also on higher position also getting more courses to be lectured by them. Moreover, they should be getting fewer courses to be lectured. Due to this issue happening in universities, I have developed a proposed system to help aid course allocation within lecturers. This project consists of system which handles the allocation of courses for the lecturers according to their expertise and position. This system is also user friendly and eases the work of the admin office to provide the lecturers their preferable courses.

1.2 STATEMENT OF PROBLEM

The manual nature of the existing course management allocation system for college lecturers’ result in errors in the number of courses offered to the lecturer. Other than that, lecturers were unable to enroll in the course that best suits their areas of expertise. Allocating courses manually can be a time-consuming. Finally, because of the changes, managing the courses is difficult.

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1.3 AIM AND OBJECTIVES

The aim of this project is to design an automated online course allocation system for lecturers.

The objectives are to:

- To manage lecturers' course assignments for their selected course in accordance with their areas of competence. 

- To Provide lecturers access so they may see the given courses.

- The last step is to develop a system that allows administrators to log in and modify the courses.

1.4 SIGNIFICANCE OF STUDY

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. It also helps on the research lecturers too by giving low number of courses according to the profile created on the system. Moreover, the system will be online based where the lecturers and administrator can access the system anytime and anywhere.

1.5 SCOPE OF STUDY

This project is designed for Federal College of Animal Health And Production Technology department of Computer Science.

1.6 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.

- Institutions: an organization founded for educational, professional, or social purpose.

- System: a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network; a complex whole.

- Online: Computer or device connected to a network (such as Internet) and ready to use (or be used by) other computers or devices.

- Academy: a place of study or training in a special field.

- Allocation: Allocation refers to the act of distributing or assigning resources, tasks, responsibilities, or positions to individuals or groups based on certain criteria or guidelines. 

- Course: a course is an educational program or unit of study that provides structured instruction, learning objectives, and assessment in a specific subject or field, allowing students to acquire knowledge and skills in a systematic manner.

- HTML: Hypertext Markup Language is the standard markup language used for creating and structuring the content of web pages on the World Wide Web.

- JAVA: Java is a high-level object-oriented programming language that allows developers to write code once and run it on multiple platforms without recompilation.

- MYSQL: MySQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) that is widely used for storing, managing, and retrieving data.

- PHP: PHP, which stands for Hypertext Preprocessor.