Designing an electronic students records management system: A case study of St. Francis Schools of Health Sciences Namataba Mukono (SFRASH).

Abstract

Electronic Students Record Management System as designed to provide efficient and accurate recording of records, to maintain and secure the student's records and easy retrieval of student records, to lessen the workload of the staffs. The study aimed at designing an Electronic Students Records Management System at SFRASH Namataba Mukono to handles the storage, maintenance and retrieval of information of students. This manual system is associated with a number of challenges such as misfiling, difficulty in retrieval, loss of files, and consumption of office space and hence delay in service delivery. The study was guided by the following objectives as: general objective to design an electronic system that would ease the management of the students' records effectively and efficiently to enable timely decision making in St Francis Schools of Health Sciences (SFRASH) and specific objectives: To find out the various types of records kept, to investigate the current system of student’s record management, to gather requirements for designing an electronic student’s records management system, to design and implement an electronic students records management system and to test and validate the system at SFRASH. The study was also carried out under the following research questions: What are the different types of records kept, how are students records currently kept, what are some of the requirements and the tools used for gathering information for the requirements needed for designing an electronic student’s records management system, how will the system be designed and implemented and what are the methods for testing and validating the system. Data was gathered using interviews, observation and document review. The collected data was sorted and analyzed using tables and it was found out that the current manual system is in-efficient, time and space consuming in addition to being insecure hence judged not good for the management of records. The system was designed using visual studio 2019 and Microsoft Access Database 2013. An electronic system developed enables electronic capturing of students' data, storing of this data in an electronic database which eases the retrieval of the same data, any time by only authorized people. The developed computerized system also allows the backup of data on movable devices like flash disks, memory cards and external hard drives which increases the capacity of backup.