A service-oriented technical framework for the development of integrated education management information system

Abstract

The increasing demand for education, especially tertiary education, has triggered a lot of challenges within the university system, especially in developing nations like Nigeria. These challenges include management and administration of the following: students’ enrolment, staff and students profile information, tuition fees payment, course registration, examination, and result processing, among others. The development of various types of Education Management Information Systems (EMIS) to alleviate these challenges has presented a more efficient means of optimising processes in the university systems. Thus, stakeholders within the university system: administrators, lecturers and students interact with the EMIS to ease their respective academic activities. However, these EMIS are designed, developed, and deployed with different application platforms and programming standards, which make it difficult for different EMIS to share information as they act as isolated information island. Thus, there is a challenge of data exchange in integrating different EMIS to achieve cross platform data exchange. Meanwhile, there are such initiatives on standard frameworks for the integration of disparate systems that are found in education institutions like the Education Management Information System Interoperability Framework (EMIF) and the School Interoperability Framework (SIF). However, the complexity in the mechanism for data exchange of these frameworks and the limited focus on the design structure of EMIS that can easily adapt and integrate limit their use in education institutions, especially those in developing countries with limited technical manpower and knowhow. In the search for a simplified framework that reconsider EMIS as an integrated system that can seamlessly exchange data, this research study involved the investigation, design, demonstration, and evaluation of a service-oriented technical framework for the development of integrated EMIS using the design science research methodology. This study, therefore, contributed to knowledge with the proposition of a technical framework that simplifies and standardizes the development of integrated EMIS that seamlessly exchange data among different functional modules. The technical framework is designed based on the identified layered conceptual components: a) Education Information Structure (EIS) that provides adaptable Central Information System (CIS) for handling the specific information requirements of different education systems with Access Control that provides a layer of security services to check and grant authorization and authentication access; b) Service-Oriented Design layer that handles integration of functional modules to connect with the EIS with service interfaces using Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interface (REST API); c) Demonstration Logic layer that recognizes the development platform and the flexibility of the programming logic to scale with new information requirements; d) Data Exchange Mechanism that provides a layer of standard data serialization format using Java Script Object Notation (JSON) to exchange data, through the RESTful API services, among functional modules in the Service-Oriented Design layer and the CIS in the EIS layer; e) Database System layer that handles data storage and requests from services. Thus, the framework makes key contributions with provision for customisation and multi-tenant cloud approach for adaptability and standardisation of the development of integrated EMIS to fit into different education systems. It was demonstrated on a web-based platform using the Laravel development platform that offer framework for rapid application development. The demonstration considered a case study approach, and the evaluation was based on expert reviews and comparative analysis within the context of the key requirements from the research findings. These requirements are: a) Adaptability that consider the suitability to fit into the specific information requirement of the different education systems; b) Maintainability that underscore the use of simplified common technologies that can be delivered within the knowledge of the EMIS developer; c) Standardization that check for the use of standard technologies and techniques; d) Scalability that consider provision for extension of the CIS and the functional modules to respond to changes in information requirements of the education system; e) Connectivity that benchmark access to shared data sources by the different functional modules of the integrated EMIS; f) Accessibility that benchmark usability of the platform to deliver user expectations on cross-platform data for presentation. In essence, the technical framework is appropriate for the development of an integrated EMIS that uses simplified technologies and techniques for achieving EMIS integration. While the framework addressed the integrated EMIS development that achieve seamless data exchange and scalability using the service endpoint extensions, the issues of optimizing the framework for enhanced security and performance are open to further research.