A WEB-BASED COURSE AND TEACHING EVALUATION SYSTEM: AN OPEN SOURCE APPROACH

Abstract

The exercise of course and teaching evaluation is a process carried out by the Academic Division of University Malaya in obtaining students’ feedbacks on the quality of course and teaching taken by students. Currently the method used in University Malaya is the web-based survey named Course and Teaching Evaluation System (CTES). The process was conducted via web-based for the first time in Semester 1 Session 2007/2008. A survey was conducted among students, academic staff and faculty administrators from selected faculties regarding their experience in using CTES which was carried out in Semester 1 Session 2007/2008. The survey results showed that the majority of CTES users agreed that CTES must replace the manual evaluation that was used previously to assess course and teaching evaluation. However the current system needs to be enhanced and to have more functionality to fulfill users’ needs. The study also discovered some weaknesses in the current system such as the database design which needs to be catered for the new proposed system. The system was developed follows the current requirement of the system with extra features and functionalities such as different access level for academic staff, editing for grouping information in students module, identify students who did not take part in the course evaluation and trigger email to the students in the administrator module. By using the new proposed system, many of the unnecessary work can be eliminated and unnecessary cost can be cut off for example licensing fees and consultancy fee. Besides that this research also shows that the integration between databases which is open source software (MySQL) and proprietary software (Oracle) should not be a problem. Developing this system has proved the capabilities of open source technologies like MySQL, PHP and Apache. From this research, users’ satisfaction of current system and weaknesses of current system can be identified to improve the system. A system was developed using open source approach called Course and Teaching Evaluation System Version 2.0.