Online Course Selection System

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

1.0 Introduction

Online Course Selection System is a system that allow all students who study in the university login to university’s website and select their interested courses which provided by the university for the next semester. The researchers believe that, most of the universities have already deployed this system for many years ago. However, this online course selection system is in fact different from the others. Many universities will ask students to check the pre-requisite subjects and calculate the total credit hours before selecting a course regardless by form or online application. However, students are often making mistake on checking and calculating the pre-requisite subjects and credit hours, and thus universities may need to assign more time and effort to help student to handle this problem. And absolutely the proposed system will solve these problems.

Besides that, the proposed system will also check and avoid the timetable confliction which other course selection system rarely concerned about it. In addition, the system also control the capacity of the classes to avoid too many students in a class. A conflict free timetable that is best suit the students within the limited resources will also be generated at the end of the course selection.

The researcher believes that the proposed system is practicable and achievable. The system can allow student to select courses and schedule the timetable for the student, which also ease the work of the scheduler and satisfy students by using the online course selection system.

2.0 Problem Statement and Literature Review

The problems and some of the articles or journals which are relevant to the research area will be listed and surveyed on this section.

In most of the university, students may not have the right to gain control of the courses that will be taken in the next semester. Moreover, the timetables for all courses that provided by the university are done by the department named Timetabling office or special group of people have the position named scheduler or staff like administrative Executive. In most of the case, courses and timetables will only have less attention on students’ need and more concerned on the lecturers time availability and room availability. Thus students were not contented with the courses and timetable that provided by the university due to many reason like the long period of break time between classes and the interested courses are not taken in next semester. Therefore, students’ need and satisfaction cannot be achieved.

The seminal study in this area is Wang et al. (2008) proposed that to develop an automated course scheduling system which is customer-oriented in designing the system stems from the students are the customers of the university, thus students should have the initiative to decide on which timetable should be chosen for the courses in the next semester, and hence customer satisfaction can be achieved. Another similar research study was conducted by Najdpour and Feizi-Derakhshi (2010) found that an automated course timetabling system should prioritize students’ preference in the first priority and produce a timetable that is truly appropriate for the students and lecturers for the purpose of increasing the satisfaction of the students and lecturers. Besides that, Hsu and Chao (2009) proposed the use of student-oriented class-course timetabling model to gratify students’ need in the event of taking or retaking courses and also to assure the student time and university resource will be fully utilized. A much different study that yielded similar results was conducted by Chen and Ji (2012), who found that the physical education course-selecting model should be able to handle the flexibly of students’ behaviors on selecting particular physical courses as much as possible.

Scheduling a timetable for different groups of students in a university is a knotty problem. Not only students’ and lecturers’ preferences have to take into consideration, but also the resources that available like room and lab availability. In addition, there are also other hard and soft constraints have to take into account like students may only have one class at one timeslot and lecturer want the class on weekend . Consequently, many approaches and researches have been conducted but no one claim to be the best solution yet. Thus the proposed system is devised in order to make some contributions on this research area and also ease the work of scheduler.

However, somewhat in contrast to the proposed system is Yang and Jat (2011) who argue that the timetabling problems which were a set of activities (classes) that needed to be allocated into a suitable timeslot and appropriate room by using different search technique, such as guided and local search works together with the genetic algorithms to overcome the problems. Besides that, Akbarzadeh-T and Qaurooni (2012) argue that evolutionary algorithms should have applied in order to resolve the timetabling problems which are a set of events that allotting the resource properly and do not violate any soft and hard constraints. Moreover, Mahiba and Duria (2012) also disagree with the proposed idea and argue that a system which applied genetic algorithm together with the local, guided and tabu search strategies (knows as Search Bank Strategies) should have deployed to solve the timetabling problems which are about how to schedule the classes to the appropriate timeslot and class room that will satisfy the lecturers and students. In addition, Raghavjee and Pillay (2008) pointed out that, much researches have been conducted into solving the timetabling problem of particular institute or university rather than comparing the techniques that used to surmount the timetabling problem. The research paper which published by them was doing an in depth study on the genetic algorithms compare to other techniques and conclude that the performance of genetic algorithm was much better than the other techniques. On the other hand, Hashim et al (2009) argues that the relationship of timeslot, subject and class room are complicated, thus Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization should be applied to address these problems. Furthermore, Turabieh and El-Daoud (2012) argue that, a mixture of approaches should work together to provide a best solution for the timetabling problems. This approach is known as the combination of graph coloring and hybrid meta-heuristics approach.

3.0 Aims and Objective

The aims of this research is to develop an online course selection system that allow students to select courses that are interested and the timeslot for the corresponding course as well as arrange the timetable that suit the students’ requirement. Besides that, this system also verify student based on the pre-requisite subject and assist the scheduler to determine which classes and time are most demanding by student.

These above aims raise the following project objectives. First, the system will check for the pre-requisite subjects from the logged in student’s course history, provided that the student did not attend any pre-requisite subjects before, the system may only allow the student to select pre-requite subjects and subjects that do not require any pre-requisite subject for next semester. Whereas, if the student has already taken all the pre-requisite subjects, the system will provide a list of courses that the student is eligible to select for next semester. Moreover, the proposed system will also calculate the total credit hours from the selected courses and notify as well as prevent students from exceeding the permitted credit hours.

Secondly, the proposed system will notice students when selected courses that will lead to timetable conflict and recommend students to re-select the timeslot again in order to avoid the timetable conflict problem. Besides that, the proposed system also oversee the capacity of particular timeslot of certain course, once the maximum amount of capacity have been meet, the request function will be enable for the timeslot and the total amount of requests will be send to administrative staff in order to determine how demanding of particular timeslot of the course is. Thus the schedulers are able to pinpoint the most demanding courses and provide more classes in order to meet the students’ requirement.

After all, students are allowed to view and edit all the selected courses for next semester and also allow students to generate a timetable and print it out for future reference.

4.0 Research Question

This section is consists of Domain and Technical questions and will be organized into table form.

No

Questions

Domain

1

What information should be displayed on the system in order to allow students clearly understand the rule of selecting a course?

2

What constraint should be considered for the online course selection system?

3

What data is needed by admin in order to schedule the timetable?

4

What are the pre-requite subject that available?

5

What is the happen if the student has miss out the pre-requite subjects?

Technical

1

What type of web development programming language should use to develop the online course selection system?

2

What database should be used for the proposed system?

3

How to integrate the proposed system with the student database?

4

How should the system automatically send graph and information to admin?

5

What web development methodology that best suit the project?

Table Research Questions

5.0 Research Design

In this section, the data gathering method, data analysis method and the timeline which will show the tasks that will be accomplished for the 1st semester of level 3 will be discuss in detail.

5.1 Data Gathering (Survey)

The researcher will apply two different data gathering methods for two different group of respondents, which are web-based questionnaires to collect data from students at different universities and face to face interviews to collect data from the administrative staff.

The questionnaire method is best suit when there are tremendous amount of population needed to be surveyed with limited resources and irrespective of geographical area and location. This research is targeted 100 students from different universities and this method can be distributed rapidly and inexpensively and help researcher to reduce the cost and time that needed by using web-based questionnaire. Therefore, the questionnaire method is appropriate data gathering method to be applied in order to obtain the data about how students satisfy with or without an online course selection system and what is needed to be put in the system.

On the other hand, the interview (Semi-Structure) method should be used to collect information from the admin staff in order to allow the researcher have a better understanding on what information are needed by system and how the current system work. During the interview, researcher is able to gain immediate respond from the respondents and thus discussion is allowed. Hence, this interview method is needed to gain information from the respondents about what data are needed to schedule a feasible timetable.

5.2 Data Analysis

In this research, two sampling method will be applied for the two different data gathering methods which are stratified sampling for questionnaire method and purposive sampling for interview method.

Stratified sampling method will be used when there are few distinct groups that to be investigated in order to highlight the subgroups from the population and the researchers would like to observer or discover the relationship among the subgroups. This research is intended to survey 100 students from different university, thus the sample size needed will be 50 and the researcher would like to investigate the satisfaction of students on selecting course with and without online course selection system. Therefore, the data collected should organized into two different groups which are experience user and non-experience user. For the aforementioned reasons, there is no doubt that the stratified sampling method is suitable to be the data analysis method for this research.

Besides that, the purposive sampling method will be used for the interview data gathering method as well. Due to the reason that the researcher would like to gain more useful information only from the respondents who have at least one year of working experience in the scheduling department. The sampling population is 15 respondents and the sampling size of 10 samples. This sampling method is suitable due to this method will only take the sample that related to the research purpose and eliminate the unrelated answer from the sample.

To sum up the foregoing, the stratified and purposive sampling are the suitable data sampling method to be applied in the study.

6.0 Personal Reflection

Online course selection system is a web-based system that planned to work with the latest web programming language which is HTML 5 and integrate with the local DBMS. But the fact remains that the developer has no experience on using HTML 5 and it may take some time for developer to start from zero and the aim may not be able to achieve within the given time, thus developer may need to consider to apply ASP.Net or Dreamweaver to substitute for the HTML 5 language. Due to the fact that developer has more experience on using ASP.Net and Dreamweaver to developer a web-based program.

Additionally, the proposed online course selection system is used by students to select courses for next intake or semester. However, provided there are too many students access the system at the same time to select courses, the system may not be able to handle the overwhelming requests and it will deny students from accessing the system. Thus an alternative way is to develop a waiting room for students when too many students access the system, so that the system may be able to working perfectly.

Furthermore, the interview data gathering method is suitable to be conducted by researcher in order to have a better understanding of the research area. However, applying interview data gathering technique may consume a lot of time and money due to the reason that researcher may need to travel around to other universities in order to gain the data that are needed, this may cause some delay from the promised date and the aim may not be able to accomplish since researcher may not have the transportation to travel around so many universities. Consequently, web-based questionnaire data gathering method should be applied as an alternative way to obtain data from the administrative staff for the purpose of reducing the cost and time needed by using the interview data gathering method, and thus the aims of this proposal are able to accomplish within the given time.