A university is a community with many people precisely student with each taking different courses. Students’ details from the admission date to graduation is maintained in school, and even after the student has graduated, the students remain alumni, and thus their details are stored in university (Thalheim, 2013). Such information includes names, registration numbers, programs, course units, grades, age, and gender. On the other hand, tutors have details such as names, employment number, social security numbers, insurance number, age, and gender.
Also, in a university, there is information such as faculties, departments, programs, and units. All this entails sums up to an extensive data to be difficult to handle manually. The confine and efficient way of managing such data is to use a computerized database that will ease retrieval, insertion, analysis, deletion, and other data manipulation (Rum Baugh, Booch, & Jacobson, 2017). The aim of this proposal is the design and implementation of a University database that will simulate data manipulation transaction processes. Assumptions The relationship between online grade book and students an assumption that all students in the university share the single online grade book because the grading systems in all the faculties are the same. The relationship between tutors and department depicts an assumption that tutors are specialists in the particular department and that they do not take lectures on other departments.
Limitations The idea that the tutors are specialists in a particular department will force the university to employ many tutors to cover the department units. This is a limitation because it will increase expenditure on lectures as many tutors will be paid off. UML Class diagram The four types of business intelligence reports that could help university management The following are four types of business intelligence report tools that the university could use in course management, student enrolment, and historical tracking.
Portals
These are web applications that are linked to databases. They are mainly of two types: The Student portal and staff portal. This web platforms will help university management in enrolling students online, posting grades to student’s online, and invoicing student’s accounts online (Rum Baugh et al., 2017) ii. Dashboards. This is software that is linked to university databases to provide a real-time digital visual depiction of the progress of student management activities.
This functionality will help university management in instant viewing of new students being enrolled by the online system (Thalheim, 2013). iii. Extract, transform and load. These are software and processes that are used in finding, cleaning, and processes data in integrated computer systems.
This functionality will help university management in retrieving and processing data from warehouses. iv. On-Line Analysis Processing. These are data analysis tools used for multidimensional data analysis (Rum Baugh et al., 2017). OLAP is a software that contains relational database functionalities that will help universities in feeding student data in them, and the system will analyze it online. Outsourcing database functionalities.
i. Federal. This vendor manufactures open source administration software for school management especially handling records (Thalheim, 2013). The software has the following features: Management of courses in various department, massive admission of students, communication between integrated faculties in a school, dashboards that display a visual depiction of automatic data processing in the database of the system, information of students and their status, and tracking of student’s attendance in classes. The advantages of this software are that it provides the institution with the unlimited administration and student’s enrolment and logins. The system was developed using Rails and Ruby, and therefore the institution can customize the code to suit their needs.
Opens IS. This vendor produces open source student management software called Opens IS. It is used in maintaining student transcripts, class attendance, and information on demographics, timetabling, grade management, and customized report. The software provides the following functionalities: Management of library, management of contacts, generation of report cards, and reporting of government activities in school.
The only disadvantage of the software from this vendor is that is that the Information Technology members will have to be in familiarity with PostgreSQL (Thalheim, 2013). v. Gibbon vendor. Gibbon developed open source school management software called gibbon.
It deals with school administration and provides useful services for tutors. The following are the features of gibbon: Tracking for class attendance, management of class, timetabling, management of the department, management of the library, grading students, management of students, management of faculties, massaging between faculties, management of examining, management of tutors (Rum Baugh et al., 2017).
Recommendation
I recommend that the universities should consume Federal. This is because the software is open source and is scalable.
It is easy to customize by the fact that it is coded using Rails and Ruby. This means that the school will not have to introduce a new management software when changes in administration and increased in size of data to be handled but will modify the system by adding the desired components. Comparison between Federal, Opens IS, and Gibbon The three-school management software is similar in the following functionalities. The three software can pride the following features in common.
Tracking of students in attending classes and checking on tutors will be taking lectures in their allocated units. b) Management of faculties and their department regarding timetabling course units and assigning groups to tutors c) Management of students in here respective schools and departments by enrolment, processing of results, and grading students. The contrast between Federal, Opens IS, and Gibbon. Federal and Gibbon have dashboards that provide university management graphical depiction of continuing data processing in the system database. Opens IS does not provide this functionality.
Opens IS includes reporting of government activities butt Gibbon and Federal does not give such functionality to the university management. Thirdly, Gibbon offers rubric functionality for the management by both Federal and Opens IS does not provide this functionality.
References
- Coronel, C. & Morris S. (2017, 2015).
- Database systems design, implementation and management (12th ed.), Cengage Learning, Boston, MA Rum Baugh, J., Booch, G., & Jacobson, I. (2017). The unified modeling language reference manual. Addison Wesley. Thalheim, B. (2013).
- Entity-relationship modeling: foundations of database technology. Springer Science & Business Media.
