Abstract:

The Student Industrial Work Experience Scheme (SIWES) was established by the Industrial Training Fund (ITF), a Nigerian government agency, in 1973. Students studying science and technology in any Nigerian higher institutions are mandated to undergo SIWES in order to acquire technical skills before graduation. Hence, active participation in SIWES is a pre-requisite for the award of diploma and the various degree certificates in almost all institutions of higher learning in Nigeria. However, the monitoring methods (which are majorly manual) , that are adopted hitherto to ensure adherence by students to the rules and regulations of the scheme have been grossly inefficient. Therefore, we developed an electronic management platform tagged e-SIWES Portal and deployed it on the Internet to effectively monitor Covenant University students that are undergoing SIWES. The web address of the portal is esiwes.covenantuniversity.edu.ng. The platform has helped to keep a close tab on the daily activities of the students through its inherent features such as e-logbook, e-grading, e-supervision and host of others. Also, the platform has afforded the opportunity of monitoring students that are undertaking the SIWES program in foreign countries in real time and on regular basis. Based on the gains from the deployment of the platform by Covenant University on the Internet, we are currently advocating its adoption by other institutions of higher learning in the country.

Keywords:

e-SIWES, ITF, Portal, e-logbook, e-grading and e-supervision.