De La Salle University - Manila

E-College

The E-College is an integrated system designed by the College of Computer Studies (CCS) to support the education value chain (Sison et al., 2000). The support may come in the form of automation of value chain activities, or provision of tools that facilitate, if not make possible, the planning, organizing, and (performance) monitoring of activities in the value chain. The system therefore has to serve a diverse pool of users: students, faculty, administrators, guidance counselors, student organizations, alumni, companies, the Office of Career Services, and feeder schools. It is in terms of the functions available to these various users that we now describe the architecture of the E-College.

To automate educational delivery, E-College is equipped with an e-learning subsystem wherein a student can experience multimedia presentations of lessons, take exams, access course materials, view class standing, participate in discussion sessions, and access static announcements for a given course online. The system also supports enrollment-related transactions such as enlistment for courses and fee assessment.

The system serves as a portal specifically designed for the needs of an educational institution, combining tools and elements that are normally found in diverse locations. There is seamless interaction among various users and modules of the system (i.e., a student's enrollment in a certain class will cause his calendar to automatically reflect that class during the appropriate days and time slots).

The E-College system also provides the student with tools for personal management and communication. It allows students to access announcements and reminders for the general student body, provide immediate feedback on different aspects of operations of the college (such as feedback on staff, guidance, and IT services), view transcripts of records as well as other evaluations from teachers, counselors, and internship sponsors, maintain an editable resume, and manage his time through appointment-setting facilities and through a flexible calendar and planner.

Faculty

The E-College system includes a faculty information system that provides support for decision-making in human resource functions such as hiring, career movement (such as promotion), and matching faculty skills with specific needs. The system allows faculty members and appropriate administrators to maintain and selectively view 201 files online. Being in electronic form, data can be easily reorganized and summarized into flexible reports for management-level previewing and decision-making. The faculty information system also allows users, internal as well as external, to easily search for experts or resource persons from among the faculty, follow or monitor teaching, research and community service activities, and communicate with various groups of people through electronic announcements.

As mentioned earlier, the E-College incorporates an e-learning subsystem that allows online course delivery, learning, and student evaluation. Course sessions, for instance, may be conducted in either synchronous or asynchronous mode. Multimedia course objects (course lessons, exams, glossaries, teaching aids) can be created, modified, and organized by faculty members or instructional technologists with ease, aided by tools such as a syllabus wizard, lesson templates, and knowledge/course explorers and editors.

Student-faculty interaction in the context of a course can be done through online sessions, with synchronous discussions aided by a facility for asking (queued) questions, supplementary material uploaded from a repository, and the use of a simulated whiteboard. The faculty member can also manage chat sessions, and maintain a discussion board where questions, opinions, feedback, and responses may be posted as threads in an asynchronous discussion.

Student assessment may also be done online. Evaluations can be carried out online via examinations, exercises, and projects, with exams graded by the system and projects graded by the instructor. Grades can be readily seen because the instructor can keep a grade book that provides for automatic computation and sorting, relieving faculty members of manual computation.

Alumni

The system does not terminate the management and tracking of students upon their graduation; rather, the system provides graduates (hereonafter referred to as new alumni) with access to several alumni accounts, one being registration for the DLSAA Card, which is the official alumni card of the De La Salle Alumni Association. Alumni are also highly encouraged to visit the new and improved official DLSAA web site, where they may sign in and register an account for themselves for inclusion in the Alumni Association's database. Easy and efficient access to alumni and school chapters are facilitated via e-mail and correspondence through the Web site bulletins themselves.

Through their system account, alumni are able to generate and access specific documents and records such as transcripts and gather other alumni data with the Web site's search function. Furthermore, the system allows them to maintain an editable resume, post announcements to alumni, and search for information on other alumni using various fields.

Other Internal Users

The E-College system can also be tapped by other units for more specialized uses. Student organizations, for instance, may use it as a venue to communicate with students with ease, using the system to post activities, reminders, and announcements, maintain a calendar of activities, and maintain mailing lists.

If a complex practicum or thesis program is in place (and overseen by a coordinator), the system can provide them with a facility that supports communication and manages information related to thesis/practicum activities, students, and materials. The system, for instance, provides administrative support by allowing the modification, maintenance, distribution and submission of thesis/practicum-related forms such as requests for changes in adviser, transmittals, and waivers. It also manages a database for thesis/practicum group information (activities, profile, defense requirements, schedules, and defense outcomes), and supports the maintenance of a thesis library system, allowing searching (by department, category, adviser, or year) and viewing (of abstracts and materials) of archived thesis materials.

Guidance counselors can also use the system as an electronic administrative assistant, keeping in electronic form a complete record of all students, ranging from biographical data to appointments and interview documentation. The system allows counselors to maintain a calendar which specifies open appointment dates for student sessions, easily view the student personal information form, and easily complete and maintain student reports such as monthly progress reports, cumulative records, and student group testing forms.

External Users

The E-College system is not meant exclusively for internal users and processes within the College of Computer Studies. All efforts to manage an organization's "internal" value chain will be negated if it fails to consider the quality of the input provided by suppliers, as well as the quality of the output demanded by its customers. The design of E-College, therefore, takes into consideration the origin, as well as the ultimate destination, of its main object of focus - the students. In this sense, the system extends beyond the value chain and spans to encompass the college's "supply chain" as well. This supply chain can be viewed as beginning with feeder schools and ending with the employers of the university's graduates. Efforts are made to strengthen these links by communication and information sharing between parties. External users of the system therefore include feeder schools and employers of its graduates.

The system will allow feeder schools to evaluate the quality of their high school graduates. They will be given access to aggregate data (mortality in entrance exams, the number of their graduates who are actually enrolled in various programs across the university), as well as individual data (résumés of their most recent valedictorian, curricular and extra-curricular performance of their graduates).

Industry partners who are employers or potential employers of alumni are given a built-in electronic recruitment assistant. They can access student résumés, and locate and track students with certain target characteristics such as high grade point averages through a search mechanism that allows them to choose students according to their set of criteria. They can also provide immediate feedback regarding performance of alumni. All form-facilitated feedback given by users of the system can be automatically summarized for administrators.

Companies who are partners by virtue of a practicum program also use mechanisms that allow them to maintain and transmit company-related forms such as referrals, reply slips, evaluations, and progress reports. They are also allowed to conduct and send evaluations of students electronically, as well as receive feedback from students and key administrators (such as the practicum coordinator) of the college.

References

Sison, R., Pablo, A., and the E-College Team. 2000. Value Chain Framework and Support System for Higher Education. In the Proceedings of the South East Asian Regional Conference 2000, Manila, Philippines.