Jigawa State Skills Acquisition Centers Management System

Introduction

Background to the Study

Jigawa State Skills Acquisition Centers, are the newly opened centers in the State established during the time of Governor Sule Lamido (around the year 2011 to 2012) that intends to eliminate poverty and empowered youth for stand-alone life.

Over the last decade, researchers and practitioners have developed a wide range of knowledge related to skills acquisition. This include different elements and components; infrastructures, tools, content-oriented applications, human-computer interactions, pedagogical issues, methodologies and models, case studies and projects. As a result of this, computers have become an essential factor in controlling, managing, directing, maximizing results and thus enabled machines to take over many human-like tasks which are prone to errors that are being carried out manually.

Currently all of the center information, course registration, and student’s center allocation systems used in Jigawa State Skills Acquisition centers are manual and to achieve the Center’s vision there is need to provide critical operations with an online system because majority of the centers activities demand Information Technology (IT) integration so as to take advantage of its benefits. With these therefore a robust and integrated system network that will unify management of the centers activities is among the basic needs, because the organization will continually refine field to accommodate student from various states and this involve high population which need online system to achieve its goals.

This chapter briefly describes the overall idea of the development of an online System for Jigawa Skills Acquisition Centers, Jigawa State. As a matter of fact, these centers will like to engage in so many activities such as registering new students, and updating the existing students uploading the centers products and advert, passing of information to the entire state and this need online system for proper and secure activities.

Statement of the project problem

In most centers of the state admission into them are growing fast due to the empowerment and advise given by the government. This lead to high population to the centers. This increase in student population over the years makes the work of centers activities very tedious exercise (student registration, file processing, storage etc.).

At present, the entire Jigawa State Skills Acquisition Centers uses a manual system of generating records of student training processes which is done by the assigned personnel and other necessary things which is time consuming and lacks efficiency. Using manual system to achieve any task is tiring. The Centers used manual system to run their activities, which is not modernized nowadays.

The existing manual system of admitting advertising of products and uploading Tutors details to the general public by the centers is basically done by assigning personnel to the students by the management, and this can lead to uncontrolled redundancy to centers system . The management gives out form to the new students to fill and submit to them. This existing system has some major drawbacks such as:

1. INEFFICIENT: It is tiresome and failing to make the best use of time since it is more of human effort.
2. INFLEXIBLE: The current way of processing of management System used by the centers is not flexible.
3. MANAGEMENT: Processing the list of new admitted students, and their allocation to the respective centers can be problematic.
4. STORAGE: A lot of documents and files needed to be stored which can lead to an unproductive use of storage space since paper takes up massive amount of space.

Aim of the project

The aim of this project is to design and develop a user friendly Online System for Jigawa State Skills Acquisition Centers (JSSAC) to help and manage the process of the activities smooth movement , and effectively allocate the students to their centers . To this end, the JSSAC aim is to provide a flexible platform upon which all the centers can use the system effectively. The Online System of the centers, aim to simplify the process, bring everything together in a single place, and as it’s an online system, it can be accessed by other students at any time or place.

The system will allow a new student to choose a preferred center and field of interest, existing students to view their profile and year of graduation. The system automatically allows the center to communicate with each other and advertise their products and services. The development of this Web based system will eliminate the problems of the existing manual system, and upgrade the currently used of online system for Jigawa State Skills Acquisition Centers (JSSAC) in the entire state.

Objectives of the project

To achieve the aim of this project several objectives must be met, the major objectives are to: Create a web based system that will solve the problems of the existing manual system being used. Design a system that will manage the activities of the centers to people interesting in coming into and even purchasing products of the centers and Develop a system that has an increased efficiency and effectiveness in admitting new students to reduced time wastage, duplicated information. And finally, Create a system that acts as a database to the available Centers.

Significance of the project

The system serves as modern paradigm so as improve activities of the centers making it well-known to the entire nation and Passing accurate information to the public. And lastly Serves as source of communication between the centers.

Scope and limitation of the project

The scope of this project is the design and implementation of an Online System for whole Jigawa State Skills Acquisition Centers (JSSAC). The system will accommodate only the centers coordinator or any assign personnel (as admin), Tutors and students into one integrated Database system. This system covers the existing students and new students programs in the Centers. It only gives and provides a better system that is highly accessible to all students who are eligible to learn training.

Organization of the Report

The project work will be written to provide documentation on the creation of an Online System for Jigawa State Skills Acquisition Centers (JSSAC). The system is aimed at solving the problems encountered in the current manually process used by Centers. In order to achieve this, all the Centers are used as a case study for simplicity of the project.

Chapter summary

This chapter presented main the project work, outlining the aims and objectives of the Centers, it listed the significance of the proposed system, problem associated with the current system and proper solution towards the entire problem face by the Centers.

System Methodology and Design

A system development methodology refers to the framework that is used to structure, plan, and control the process of developing an information system. A wide variety of such frameworks have evolved over the years, each with its own recognized strengths and weaknesses. One system development methodology is not necessarily suitable for use by all projects. Each of the available methodologies is best suited to specific kinds of projects, based on various technical, organizational, project and team considerations.

This chapter will cover the detail explanation of methodology that is used to make this project complete and fully functional. A methodology refers to a system of broad principles or rules from which specific methods or procedures may be derived to interpret or solve different problems within the scope of a particular discipline. In order to evaluate this project, Waterfall Model (Linear Sequential Model) is used.

Waterfall Model was the first process model to be introduced; hence it is widely used in software Engineering to ensure success of the projects. In the waterfall approach, the whole process of software development is divided into separate process phases.

Generally it has five major phases, which are: the planning, analysis and requirements definition, designing, system development, and implementation.

The Waterfall adheres to important phases that are essential for developers, such as planning, analysis, design, and implementation, and are explained below.

Planning

To identify all the information and system requirement, both hardware and software, planning must be done in the proper manner. The planning phase has a major component which is data collection.

Before the system can be designed, information about the present system needs to be gathered. And all data and information was gathered through observation, interviews, and documents review.

During the study, observations were made by me on how the centers runs their activities by processing it manually. I observed that as local process for a great centers like this. Also observed tedious, time consuming the manual system will be, and regarding storage, a lot of documents and files needed to be stored which can lead to an unproductive use of storage space in the future since paper takes up massive amount of space. This method enabled the me to acquire relevant information which aided in the design of an Online Student system for the centers.

An interview is a conversation between two or more people where question are asked by the interviewer to elicit facts or statements from the interviewee. Interviews are a standard part of journalism and media reporting but are also employed in many other situations including qualitative research (Weiss. 1994).

These techniques were used in analyzing the operational documents in the activities to come up with right specifications of JSSAC proposed to be developed.

System Analysis

Having collected as much information about the existing system, the system analyst now looks through it all, understand how the system works, and identify problems that needs to be fixed. The problems of the existing system as stated in the previous chapter are understood, a list of requirements for the new system were specified.

1. The system must be a web based application so that it can be accessed anywhere and anytime.
2. The system will be designed to work for all centers in the state when altered to do so, with a proper record management.
3. The activities of the centers should be done automatically, without any human effort.
4. The system should not only automate the existing system, but also be an intelligent system. The system should completely get rid of every human effort needed.

To be executed successfully, the system needs certain hardware components and other software resources to be present on the computer. Below is the list of the entire components and other material that supports the execution of the system.

Web browser: Since the system is a web based application, it depends heavily on Internet technologies. The web browser retrieves, presents information resource from the web server.

Web server (XAMP Server): XampServer is a Windows web development environment. It allows you to create web applications with Apache2, PHP and a MySQL database. Alongside, PhpMyAdmin allows you to manage easily your databases.

Peripheral devices such as I/O devices, Network devices, etc.

System Design

Systems design is the process of defining the architecture, components, modules, interfaces, and data for a system to satisfy specified requirement. Systems design could be seen as the application of systems theory to product development. Summarily the design stage is the conversion of the analysis model in to workable design of the software. In this stage various tools will be used for the design.

The logical design of a system pertains to an abstract representation of the data flows, inputs and outputs of the systems. This is often conducted via modeling, using an over-abstract (and sometimes graphical) model of the actual system. In the context of systems design are included. Logical design includes ER Diagrams and Models i.e. Entity Relationship Diagrams and Models, Sequence Diagram, Use case Diagram Database Schema Diagrams.

In software engineering, an entity-relationship model (ERD-Model) is a data model for describing the data or information aspects of a business domain or its process requirements, in an abstract way that lends itself to ultimately being implemented in a database such as a relational database. The main components of Entity Relation Models are entities (things) and the relationships that can exist among them, and databases (Peter, 1976).

ER-Diagrams are another way of showing information flow for a process. An ER-Diagram shows what data is being used in the process or program, and how the files are related.

The sequence diagram (SD) specifies the time and control aspects of a system. Typically, SD is only used to analyze the more complex business events. Which are actions between the objects in the project. Business can also transmit data. A scenario is a sequence of events during one execution of a program. A scenario can include all the events or only the events sent to or received by certain objects in the system. In sequence diagram the parallel vertical lines, indicate different processes or objects that occur simultaneously, while the horizontal arrows denote the messages exchanged between them, in the order of their occurrences. This allows the specification of simple runtime scenarios in a graphical manner, so that it would be easier for the user to follow the sequence of activities and flow of data.

A use case is a functionality which is needed by the users of the system, which describes the relationships between the actors and use cases. It is used mainly for requirements analysis, which provides a black box approach to functional modeling, which is usually done at the early phases of modeling, where the system is defined by exploring the functions necessary (Francois C, 2010).

Physical Design

The physical design relates to the actual input and output processes of the system. This is laid down in terms of how data is inputted into a system, how it is verified, authenticated, how it is processed, and how it is displayed as in Physical design, the following requirements about the system are decided. The system involves input via a keyboard, processing within the CPU, and output via a monitor, printer.

Input Requirements: This is an interface between the user and the system that allows the user to enter data. Data input is generally done through the standard terminal keyboard or with the mouse. The system provides an input Form field were the centers personnel inputs the activities of the center and uploads materials needed for advertisement.

Output Requirements: All the activities inputted to the system are being displayed to the students on the screen. Students may choose any one of their choice and admin will send an acknowledgement to the student for accepting his request.

Storage Requirements: Every input to the system is sent to the database for proper storage and manipulation. It keeps record of every data inputted to the system over a long period of time.

System Development

This phase produces the actual code that will be delivered as the ‘running system’. Individual modules are well designed, developed and tested before being delivered. The development of this system involves the combination of most of the current web development technologies, software tools, and more.

Software Development Tools

There are various software tools that were used for the development of this system. From the basic server software that hosts the pages to the front-end framework used to design the system interface and the integrated development environments (IDEs) used to design the Web pages and the database. These tools are listed below:

1. Apache Web Server (Xamp version 5.6.0.0): Apache is a web server software such that when the browser request for a web page, it returns it equivalent HTML but if it’s a PHP page that is requested it first translate the PHP code to HTML then render it as a plain HTML with the help of the PHP engine, while translating the PHP code, if it requires the data from the database then the database will be invoked to retrieve record then serve the HTML file back to the requested browser. The browser reads the HTML file and displays the Web page.
2. MySQL Database Server (Version 5.5.24):MYSQL server will be used as a database server in this context. It is an open source database, it has proven to be as stable, reliable robust as most proprietary software like Oracle and SQL Server.
3. PhpMyAdmin: phpMyAdmin can manage a whole MySQL server (needs a super-user) as well as a single database. To accomplish the latter you'll need a properly set up MySQL user who can read/write only the desired database. Browse and drop databases, tables, views, columns and indexes.
4. Bootstrap: Sleek, intuitive, and powerful mobile first front-end framework for faster and easier web development.

Chapter Summary

In this chapter, the methodology used to design the system was discussed. More over under planning phase some related documents were reviewed after an observation of the current system to capture requirements. At the end diagrams like ERD, Sequence, Use case, And Database Schema were drown to represents the logical design.

Analysis, Result, Implementation and Testing

This chapter presents the study of the existing system, analysis and design of the new system. The existing Student Project allocation system was studied so as to determine the requirements and users of the system.

During the research different data collection techniques such as observation, interviews were used to gather information about the existing system. An interview with the supervisor was conducted to avail the information of how the system will work and managed.

At present, the entire Jigawa state skills acquisition centers uses a manual system of generating report of existing students which is done by the assigned personnel and other necessary things which is time consuming and lacks efficiency. The existing manual processing in the entire centers is basically done by assigning tutor to the students by the coordinator. The tutor assigns training facilities to the students to work on.

Strength

1. It can be used by computer illiterates as its manual system.
2. It eliminates web site hosting and internet service costs.

Weakness

1. Allocation is done manually.
2. Its time consuming and tiresome.
3. Its pen and paper work which will consume space for storage.

The system analysis presents the user, functional and non-functional requirements of Jigawa state skills acquisition centers (JISSAC). .