Abstract:

A usual scenario observed in higher education institutes is the secretariat getting overwhelmed with student requests whose completion involves documents exchanged among involved parties. A typical such workflow usually requires physical presence of involved persons, i.e. students and administrative personnel. However, physical presence may not always be feasible. Furthermore, poorly staffed secretariats, further complicates the problem, especially during particular academic periods (e.g., semester registration, graduation, examination periods). Shifting the completion of such administrative tasks online by eliminating the need of printouts and physical presence via increasing the use of ICT could highly facilitate and accelerate the workflow while simultaneously discharging students and the administrative personnel.

In this work, exploiting ICT and web technologies, we suggest an online interaction system for simplifying administrative procedures involving students and the secretariat in a typical higher education institute. In particular, we designed and developed a platform available online where users who can be designated either as students or as members of the administrative personnel of a university department can be logged in and carry out in a paperless manner most of the popular administrative tasks. Such tasks include student requests to which - when valid - the secretariat must respond with a reply - traditionally printed on a signed document - approving or rejecting the request. Our platform supports the fully online submission of student requests, their approval/rejection by the secretariat as well as issuing the necessary e-documents and e-certificates. Our platform currently supports students of all levels of study (undergraduate, graduate, doctoral) for submitting requests for transcripts, thesis assignment, certificates for exam participation, graduation, suspension of studies, registration cancellation, several types of progress reports and more. We developed this platform using the Wordpress CMS as well as Visual Studio Code for building and debugging.

Our platform showcases how ICT and web technologies can contribute to discharging students and administrative personnel by facilitating and simplifying popular administrative tasks via online interactive systems saving person time and effort thus making room for more creative and demanding activities.

Keywords:

Online platform, student, secretariat, higher education institutes, ICT, web, wordpress.