Student Community Communication Portal for University of Ruhuna

Abstract

University is a place where vast varieties of people gather and interact with each other. University consists with major community categories such as students, academics and non-academics. Students are the majority of the university community. Diversified set of notices can be seen everywhere in Sri Lankan university premises. Several types of notices can be seen such as posters, notices on boards, hand bills, banner and cutouts. Most of these are published by students. But effectiveness and efficiency of these types of notices are very low. It is a time & resources wasting process also. On the other hand existing mechanisms are not fit for required vital information delivery on focusing to target audience. Students are needed more effective and efficient communication system with emergency alerts service and live monitoring mechanism at rush of common places remotely. Most of the time student representatives and administrative officers need to keep track about notices they have published for further reference.

Internet and web is the world most popular tools in ICT. All local universities have been established own website and most of the time established societies in the university maintaining their own web site or a page within main university web site. But faculty level student union or university student union does not engage with web. Traditional web site, email applications or discussion forums will not fulfill this students' community communication requirement.

By introducing a new web portal dedicated for students' community communication can be done in effective and efficient manner. Existing computer network infrastructure, tools, technologies and resource person in the University can be use to develop new communication and information system with effectively and efficient manner for University community based on students' needs. This web portal integrates with content management system, emergency alert service, live monitoring and much more. Users perform as visitors, authors, editors, publishers or super administrators within their privileges. Subscribers of the system can be access restricted information which is not published to general public. It is included with customization ability and localization as user desired. Those features are implemented by server applications, DBMS, CMS, SMS gateway and much more tools.

The evaluation revealed new system is operating in acceptable level to users'. But it is clearly point out interfaces and functionalities should be significantly improved.