24-09-2012, 12:53 PM
School Allocation & Management System
Analysis Model.docx (Size: 18.98 KB / Downloads: 22)
Introduction
Currently in Afghanistan’s schools, usage of new technologies is very
limited. Most schools in Kabul have dozens of computers but they are
only used for teaching the computer subject and nobody uses them for
administration purposes. There are some limited numbers of schools
that use a computer instead of a typewriter by using Microsoft Word or
for saving some data in Microsoft Excel. However there are numerous
tasks that can be done by computers if they are programmed to do,
such as managing students’ grades or creating the school timetable.
Timetable creation and students' grade management is two of the
most tedious tasks of administration staff and teachers of schools in
Afghanistan, which they have to perform manually at the beginning,
mid and end of each school year.
The administration staffs of the schools that are responsible for
scheduling create separate timetables for students and teachers. They
also have to take care that each teacher in the schools should have a
maximum of 35 working hours per week, as well as assigning rooms to
different courses, managing laboratory access schedule and creating
exam date sheets for both teachers and students.
Managing students' grades is another task of administration staff and
teachers of the schools, which is very time consuming and error prone.
Many people are involved into this process. So there is a risk of
treachery in students' grades. Each subject teacher has to take a print
out of a list with many columns and rows and fill it with names of
students and their grade for that subject. Then the subject teacher has
to submit the list to the class teacher. The class teacher collects all the
lists from all subject teachers and creates a huge table for calculation
of students' grades and position in the class, which is then rechecked
by the administration staff of school for correction. For this reason the
grade lists are very error-sensitive, if the list contains any streaks and
unusual pen marks then the list is considered void, and the associated
teacher is asked to redo his/her task. This is very time consuming for
the class teacher to calculate and for administration staff to check for
validity.
Current System
Currently administration offices in most of afghan schools do not use
computers for performing their daily tasks. There are a limited number
of schools that use Microsoft Office products, such as Ms. Word and Ms.
Excel for performing their daily administrative tasks. Most of them do
not even have the information that computers can make a great
difference in the way they are doing their tasks when they are
programmed to do so. The only school in Kabul which uses software
that are built specially for schools is the International School of Kabul
(ISK), which uses Grade Quick software for calculating student’s grades
and Admin Plus for managing student information and printing
student’s report cards. Both of the above software are proprietary
software which are designed by Rediker software company.
Today in Afghanistan’s schools all the tasks and calculations are being
done manually and paper based.
In both of the tasks the administrative staff and the teachers are
involved. For small schools managing student grades and creating
timetable can be an easy task, but for the big schools like many
governmental schools this task is very difficult. The procedures of both
of the tasks are described in the following sections of the document.
Timetable Creation Process
Accomplishing this task is the job of academic affairs vice principal of
school. The Ministry of Education (MoE) has a curriculum that is sent to
all schools in the country so this way the subjects that are thought in
all schools are the same country wide. In this curriculum this is stated
that which standard will have to be taught which subjects and how
many hours per week. So first of all the vice principal, will see the
curriculum which comes to the schools by MoE and associates each
teacher with his/her related field's subject for each class of a standard
according to the teacher’s profile book.
Proposed System
Overview
The proposed system is intended to provide the facility of automating
the administrative tasks such as student grade management and
timetable creation for the administrative staff of Afghanistan’s schools.
This system will be a client server system, meaning the one system
acts as server, and three other systems will be its clients. Four people
who will access the system through the clients will be the system
administrator, the principal and both the academic affairs vice
principal and the administrative vice principal of the school. The
academic affairs principal of school is responsible for creating the
school’s timetables and also managing student information and the
other is responsible for resource management.