Classroom Activity Management System

Abstract

Technical Education and Training has become a leading sector in Sri Lanka's education. 36 Technical Colleges have been established around the country, under the Department of Technical Education and Training (DTET). Matara Technical College represents the Southern Province. There is a total of 34 courses available under the Matara Technical College. It has 26 permanent lecturers and 60 external lecturers. Students between 17 to 28 years of age can obtain education in these technical colleges. Students may follow the courses they prefer. The rules and regulations are almost identical to the school system. In addition to delivering lectures, a technical college teacher, have to prepare and submit lesson plans, reports and other related documents. These things cost a lot of time and effort. In Sri Lanka, teacher-cantered system of education is practiced. The teacher puts the priority on teaching. The time taken for these additional activities may reduce the effectiveness of the learning and teaching process. May be this could lead teachers to be stressed or failure to perform duties. A ‘Classroom Activity management system’ is proposed in order to resolve these problems. The purpose of this system is to provide teachers a way to perform their tasks efficiently, accurately, and reliably. This system provides number of useful features to the lectures: • Using this system, lecturers can create term notes, year plans, assessment plans, term plans, subject plans etc. The lecturer presents the lesson according to the daily plan. If it is missed, the plan must be reorganized. • The system sends email and SMS notifications to the lecturers to remind a particular lecture. Further, this method will also remind lectures about the essential issues in the classroom. • The system facilitates lecturer evaluation, student evaluation, and report generation. • User management functionalities • Backup and restore functionalities. Using this system, the technical collage can succeed the following benefits: • The main benefit of this system is minimizing documents. • Reducing operational costs • Improving the efficiency of the daily work • Improving productivity. • It also reduces human error and saves the teacher's time. • This system can be run on any modern-day browser • Users may use different types of devices to access this system (laptops, tablets, etc) This system was developed using open-source technologies. PHP language is used for coding. MySQL is used as the database management system. Bootstrap for designing interfaces, and Apache web server for hosting the web application. To test the system, unit tests was used to test the smaller pieces of code. In addition to that, system testing, acceptance testing, and the combined test method was used to test this system.