Abstract:

This work presents the design, development and implementation of an online system for completing the questionnaires for assessing university students’ feedback, expressing their satisfaction to the educational context interactions involving academic activities.

The objectives of the platform are to guarantee students’ anonymity throughout the evaluation process ensuring application security and efficient collection of all responses, comments and information resulting from the form completion so that they can be used later to generate statistics focused on different aggregation criteria. To meet these goals the platform's administration page includes end-to-end functionality to make changes to the database.

The database contains the updated academic report according to the latest version of the curriculum and the faculty schedule. The continuous database flexibility allows changes of any kind, e.g., if a teacher is assigned to a different group of students, with no need for manual intervention in the database. The platform is made up of two main components: Student ,containing all the information required to complete the form, and Administrator, with specific content management tools. Transposing the activity of completing evaluation questionnaires into the online environment is done with the help of modern technologies and methods, which give the platform dynamism, versatility and efficiency.

The platform is configured on MariaDB database with a simple architectural design that allows later modifications. The tests performed proved that the database is stable, fast, scalable and with little redundancy. In the project development the following technologies were used: Apache server, PHP, SQL, MySQL, JavaScript, jQuery, HTML, CSS, Boostrap. The development of project sources was performed on the NetBeans platform and the app implementation was done using the XAMPP package. All the technologies used are open-source, thus the platform does not add to the faculty extra implementation and exploitation costs.

The platform required installation on a faculty server, subject to computer security requirements, and pre-testing before putting it in use. Prior to launching the platform for its use by students, their anonymous authentication is guaranteed using unique identifier codes generated by the administrator and distributed to students for confidential access to the questionnaire. The information obtained is later used by the faculty decision makers to improve their educational activities and communication with students. Ensuring the specific set of management tools is useful to faculty management to facilitate the interaction between the platform and the actors involved. The solution thus implemented supports the efficiency of the educational process proposing a simple but effective methodology. For each section of the questionnaire the form filling procedure offers students the choice of predefined sets, previously loaded in the database, but allows them an important degree of liberty by editing comments and remarks on each question in the form in a non-limited free format. The built-in interface and detailed user instructions on the questionnaire pages ensure ease of use and the intuitive character of completing its columns is not a time-consuming action. The design of the platform interface is simple and ergonomic and the questionnaire can be easily expanded and adapted to any educational field or study program in the academic environment.

Keywords:

e-learning platform, emerging technologies, knowledge management, evaluation tools, virtual class, data security, adaptive systems, online feedback forms.