Design and implementation of an Online Course Registration/Management System

A. Course (module) registration is an important aspect of student enrolment process and takes place at
resumption during the first few weeks and academic resumption. Both old and new students are
required to manually register for intended courses using a paper-based course registration form and
information then sorted and analysed manually. This process can be the most tedious, time consuming
and costly and critical time sensitive information needed for effective course and class management is
delayed.

Below is the summary of the problem with the manual method at the Federal College of Education
(Tech.), (FCET), Gusau, Zamfara State, Nigeria.
Administrators
- Registration forms have to be printed which is getting costly
- Analysing, collating data and retrieving information from the registration forms is tedious,
time consuming and error-prone.
- Information of registered students is unreliable
- Information about number of students registered for a particular course is unreliable.
- Time-sensitive information needed for classroom management is often incomprehensive and
inaccurate.
- Information needed for examination preparation is inadequate leading to waste of resources
from over-printing or insufficient examination papers when underestimated.
Students
- Have to manually fill registration forms and can submit only within office hours
- Difficult to effect corrections after submission due to the stack of paper work needed to be
searched through
- Students have no record of course registered if personal copy is missing.

B. Recognizing the above problems, it becomes necessary to develop a better system to replace manual
paper-based course registration system which would eliminate repeated data entry copying from hand-
written forms, a central system where all records are kept securely, electronically and accessible at all
times. It would:
1. Allow administrators
a. to register students online
b. Maintain student information online
c. Maintain course information online
d. Generate real-time report
e. Improve data quality

2. Allow students
a. Select and submit courses online (within a specified period).
b. Effect changes to courses selected (within a specified period).
c. update personal information
d. print course registration for personal record
e. print examination pass

An online course registration system would save time and use technology to provide up-to-date, real-
time analytics for time-critical management decision-making for effective classroom management,
course allocation, examination preparations etc. It would provide the administrators, extensive
capability for data management, analysis and report generation

Some existing systems are classified as School Information Management System (SIMS), such as the
capital-sims, which is a management information system, developed for and used across England and
Wales to help with school management and student registration etc. Other existing systems which are
similar to this project are off-the-shelf software such as Fedena Pro, asapconnected and activeeducate
which all offer some form of school management and course registration modules as part of their
software solution.

I seeks to develop a secure online information system portal for course registration and management
that can be shared by several universities.

The portal would offer access to several institutions whose information is secure and logically
separate from the other; access controls, procedures, features and customization can be implemented
for each institution via the administrators panel/dashboard.

The online course registration and management system would have two parts:
1. Students course selection/registration
- System login
- Student registration
- Personal information confirmation and update
- Course selection, registration
- Course addition and dropping
- Selection viewing and confirmation
- Printing of registration form and examination pass

2. System administration.
- System admin login
- Student registration and Student Access Control
- Course administration
- Data analysis
- Report generation