School Management System &

Internet Communication Technologies

Dr. S. P. Kulshrestha
Technical Director, NIC, IGNFA, Dehradun

Abstract
A good life can not be imagine without good education and the good
education can not be achieved unless we are having good school. A good school
requires good management and administration. At present Information Technology has
brought radical changes in managing the education. It is in terms of submission of on-
line application for admission, preparation of results and its dissemination using
Internet, on-line submission of fees etc. Some of the software has been developed for
school management and proved to be very useful. Still a lot of work has to be done in
terms of infrastructure, management and design and development of the software.

What should be the design criteria of school management system? How the
software should be developed as per customized requirement of the schools? What
should the basic infrastructure in each school, in order to go for such systems? How to
deal the changing requirements of the school. Should school tries to develop their own
system or they should purchase readymade system? What will be the
securities/privacy issues? This paper will discuss the issues related with school
management with ICT, keeping in view of design, infrastructure, security/privacy etc.

Introduction
Schools are the gateway for success in life and are having very high social
recognition and status. It is the place where the future of a country is being given
shape. Generally schools are not meant only for academic development but for overall
development of a child., i.e. zeal to lean and perform, feeling of a competitive
environment, participation in sports, extra curricular and cultural activities. Managing a
school means managing all sphere of life with a high concentration on academic
activities. Considering the above fact, school management is considered as an
important subject.

With the rapid increase in population, demands for more school are being felt
and intake in a school has been increased without proportionate increase in
infrastructure and resources. Managing the affairs of the school under such situation
are becoming challenging one with limited resources without the comprise in the
quality of the education. Information & communication technologies are of great help
and acting as a tool to manage the same. Now a days the concept of computerized
checking of answer sheets, paper less examination, on-line (Internet base) result,
acceptance of payment on line has brought a radical change the management of the
school. IT is not limited to these few eye catching examples but it has been penetrated
in core functions of school management, what ever it may be.

All activities concerning with school management i.e. admission, issue of

identity card, collection of fee, reminder to defaulters, examination, evaluation ,
preparation of result, payroll, account, establishment, course management, Library,
inventory can be computerized and lot of time and efforts can be save.
Computerization process will increase the efficiency of the system. Computerization

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process will be needing computers, software, LAN, trained manpower. But considering
the direct/indirect benefits and increased efficiency, the cost towards computerization
is negligible.

Design Issue
School Management means the managing the resources required for providing good
education to the students. Some of these are listed below

 Admission
 Student Administration
 Fee Management
 Examination & Result Analysis
 Staff Administration
 Payroll & Financial Accounting
 accounting
 Time Table Generation
 Inventory Management
 Library Management & Automation
 Transport Management
 Hostel Management

Admission is very sensitive issue in the school. ICT will help school in preparing merit
list based on different criteria i.e. percentage of marks, category (SC/ST/OBC/GEN),
state of domicile etc. If admission process is computerized than it will make base
database for other sections i.e. account, examination, library etc. A provision for
photograph can be incorporated, so that the all important documents are issued with
photographs, making identification of person/student on the spot itself.

Student Administration is very essential aspect of the school management system.

Personal, parent, health, discipline, achievement and grade, skills information can be
kept along with photograph. It is also proposed to include the information about the
skill, past performances of the students in the database. It will be very helpful for the
placement of the students in various companies/institute. It will also help the
companies to select the students of their requirement. This will also lead the ways for
proper grading to the institute.

One of the important activity is the collection of tuition fee and other charges from the
students. The fee can be collected by school, bank or credit card. There is need for
proper reconciliation of fee collected from various sources. Online status of fee
payment should be obtainable time-to-time and at the same time there should be
provision to issue intimation to the defaulters.

Examination system is required to be computerized to disseminate the result in time.

There should be the provision for the evaluation, performance, analysis, rank
preparation, grade calculation, progress report card generation and printing of report
card. Examination system must take care of the attendance during examination days,
timely deposit of fee and other payment, attendance of the students during the
year/semester. If all related process are complete then only system should generate the
examination hall ticket, marks sheet, and other certificate.

Staff administration is also the focus area. Personal, carrier, educational, experience,
expertise, leaves details can be kept. There should be the provision for getting online
status of the persons on leave on a particular date when sanctioning the leave. It should

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also take care of the publication /workshop/ training attended by the staff. Details
regarding the interest of the staff/faculty can also be keep in to the database.

Financial position of a school can be easily find out with proper accounting system.
System should be such that it could find out the details of the payment made in various
heads/sub heads. Daily collection, expenditure details should be available to the
management. System should be able to take care of trial balance, Voucher printing
facility, cashbook, bankbook, and journal Register, Daybook, Payments/expenditure
details etc.. Computerized payroll will lead the way for automatic preparation of pay
bill, pay slips, yearly income, calculation of income tax etc.

System should have the provision for preparation of schedule/Timetable, attendance

status (subject wise, faculty wise classes and student’s attendance subjected wise,
course wise ). This will act as a handy tool to management which can be used analyze
the reasons behind the poor performance of the students. This should be connected
with the staff administration so that the arrangement of the substitution teachers can be
made on the basis of their work load and area of expertise.

Inventory of the various equipments is essential for each school. System should
provide complete status of items received consumed and in stock. It should also
provide the list of items which are required to be procured. Status of the items dues
against students/staff should be made available. This will improve the system of
providing the No Objection Certificate (NOC) to students/staff and lot of time can be
saved.

System should manage the entire school library through proper cataloging and
classifications. System should allow the issue of books as per the status of the
members. System should be capable enough to calculate fine and accordingly carry
forward the same to the payment made by the students. There should also be provision
to store audio/video clips of important topics in multimedia form. The same can be
made accessible to the students using intranet. These audio/video clips should be stored
separately in a directory so that the size of the database may be go beyond manageable
limits.

System should provide the facilities to manage the transport facilities. Details
regarding the students/staff using the same, who desire to get transport facilities,
creation/change of router base on no of student should be made accessible to the users.

Last but not least the complete hostel details along with occupation and vacancy status
can be kept in to the database and allotment of rooms can be done using the system.
Details of their mess account can also be kept. Student may be asked to feed the
details is they are planning to go on vacation or on leave. Accordingly the mess
arrangement can be done.

Information discussed above should be linked a web based interface can be made
accessible to the parents/student to view the performance through internet/Intranet.
Parents should be able to access performance of their wards on day to day basis. This
will bring a transparency for the activities his ward is involved with. Information about
his attendance, performance in test/exam, fees, involvement in extra curricular
activities can be made accessible to the parents. Student’s performance can directly be
sent to parents on their E-mail address. These will definitely psychological advantage
as far as the performance of the students are concerned as in case of poor performance
students hides the information from their parents.

All the study material in form of multimedia (audio, video, text) can also be put on the
school management system and student should allow to access and download the same.

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Audio, video presentation of make it easy to understand the working, concept and
principle of different subjects. This will acts as a catalyst to understand the subject.
Gap created because of absence from the class because of unavoidable circumstances
can be fulfilled using this method. .Now days such materials are available but a very
high cost to individual students.

Last but not the least a module can be developed for the feedback, grievance, and
suggestion from the student, staff and parents. This information can be kept into the
database and accordingly, this database can be used for further planning and decision
making and at the same time is management feels that the complaint lodge by the
student is genuine, an immediate action can be taken.

Basic Infrastructure

 Each section of School must have computers and connected LAN and internet.
 School management system can either be purchase or developed in house
depending up on the need. If planning to go in a big way, it is advisable to
develop in house to take care changing needs. There are advantages and
disadvantages of both. Cost of the software available ready made in market is less
as compared to developed in house. One has to make an adjustment as per the
need of the software. While in house developed software can be customized as per
the need of the school. More over it is very difficult to incorporate the changes in
the ready made software.
 In some of the cases software firms are customizing the software as per the need of
the customer at additional cost. A agreement can be made with the firm that they
will be making the required changes in the software as and when need for at-least
2-3 years. It is expected that during such time the system will stabilized and will
run smoothly.
 Schools should have trained man power to operate web based system and
understand the complexities of the working.

Design issues
 School Management System should be able to run on different environments i.e.
local machine, Intranet, Internet. Therefore it is suggested that web based
application should be developed. Web based applications can be run on different
environment.
 Sensitive information should not be kept on the machine connected with
LAN/Internet but there should be the provision to keep final outcome on
LAN/Internet.
 If we are keeping the images in to the databases then size of database increases
rapidly and becomes unmanageable. Therefore the image, Audio/video clipping
should not be stored in to the database instead it should be kept in one directory in
the system.
 Most of the schools/institutes face the problem of the reconciliation of the fees
deposited from different sources and lot of time is spent in the same. Therefore
there must be the provision for the proper reconciliation of fee collected from
various sources.
 Payment made through internet should be fully secured.
 There should be the provision for parents to access their wards performance
thorough internet.

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Security related issue
 The rate of the growth of technology is fast and at the same rate problems of
securities and privacy are arising.
 System should be protected with hardware/software firewall and the same should
be configured properly to prevent unauthorized access. Services which are not in
use must be disabled.
 Virus is critical issue for the applications running under windows environment.
Therefore anti-virus solution must be applied in al the machines of the network.
 Windows systems are more prone to virus attack therefore if applications can be
developed under LINUX/UNIX environment. It will lead to reliable, secure, secure
and safe working.
 There should the provision to keep access log of the application. This will help in
analyzing the various difficult situations i.e. who is accessing and what is trying to
do.
 It is very important that the system should be fully secure, if schools are trying to
collect the payment through on-line..
 There must be proper system of authentication and authorization so that
unauthorized person could not access the database or any other information.
 Systems having finger prints based authentication can be used for the said purpose.
 Web interface available on internet should allow to view the information and the
on-line payment of fee. Rest of the activities should not be permitted on internet.
 Peoples having their valid digital signature may only be allowed to change the
data.

Conclusion
Internet communication technologies will be of great help in managing the
affairs of the schools/ institutions. There in need that the software is having precise
piece of information. Sometime it is observed that quite detailed software may not fit
into the organization structure. Software is considered as worthless if it is not able to
serve the need of the organization. At this stage proper planning is required so that one
can precisely pin point the need of the organization and software should have the
provision for the same. ICT will not only help school management in running the
school affairs smoothly but provide a lot of information to improve them. The
databases created under such system will also be very useful for social causes and will
be the indicator for the progress of the society.