top of page

PROJECTS

Implementing Software

Since February 2016, I am involved with the implementation of the ITS Integrator Student Management System (SMS) self-help module for student registrations at a higher education institution in Gauteng. South Africa.

 

This is quite challenging as some of the faculties are using a home-grown system that is not integrated with the ERP SMS that the institution is using.

 

Although I am a BA, I need to do project planning as well as change management. Quite a challenge!

 

I started off by making presentations to several departments within most of the faculties introducing the roadmap of the implementation.

 

I am now in the phase where I am designing prototypes for new software and getting the prototypes approved by staff of the institution.

 

The actual registration using the self-help registration platform was done in January 2017. Many students could register successfully but as always with new implementations, there were a number of challenges and many lessons learned.

 

The self-help registration has been put on hold pending upgrades to the self-help registration software. Unfortunately this is a costly exercise and the project has been put on hold until the necessary funds have been secured.

Amalgamations

At the start of the 2000 decade, Minister Kader Asmal announced the amalgamation of several institutions of Higher Education.

 

Many of the clients of ITS Holdings were amongst the institution to be amalgamated.

 

I was the designer of the software that was used to merge the data of the different clients.

 

In 2002, I, together with two collegues, did the first merge exercise when the data of the Natal Technikon and ML Sultan Technikon were merged. It was a huge success with of course many lessons learned.

 

Others took the product and enhanced it. Today (2016) the architecture of the software is still in use to merge student data where the same person was allocated more than one student identification number.

My Ireland Experience

In the period 1996 to 2001, I was seconded to the office of ITS Ireland.

 

Here I was responsible for the implementation of the the ITS Integrator Systems in general, and the Student Management Systems in particular.

 

This was done at Dublin City University (1996), National University of Ireland, Cork (1997) and National University of Ireland, Maynooth (1999).

 

All three these institutions of higher learning are still using the ITS Integrator suite of systems.

Registrations at VUT

Before I joined the Vaal University of Technology (VUT), a homegrown system was used to register students. The name of this system is TechSys and is developed and maintained by Bitech Systems.

​

There are two main strengths in TechSys:

  • it allows staff to build a Lecturing Timetable (LTT)

    • There is a handy graphical view of the LTT

    • Users can 'test' the LTT against expected number of students

  • during registration, TechSys allocates students to groups:

    • Allocate students to Class, Practical and Tutorial groups

    • The spread to groups are evenly done so that no one lecturer has a heavy load and another lecturer a lighter load

    • Students are allocated without clashes

    • If a clash occurs, the student cannot take that module

    • When a student has a change of mind, that student's allocation is redone and if a clash should occur, the change cannot be made or the student must choose another module

    • If for some reason, a group needs to be removed, all the students in the module can be refitted.

​

Before July 2018, the registrations in TechSys had to manually captured in the Student Management System (SMS) of ERP system used by VUT: the ITS Integrator suite of systems. These systems are developed and maintained by Adapt It.

​

These manual actions ultimately led to numerous  errors that took a lot of effort to correct.

​

For the July 2018 registrations, phase 1 of building an API between TechSys and ITS was implemented. This meant that the initial registration information was programmatically captured in the ITS SMS. This was a huge success with both staff and students very complementary about the process.

​

Unfortunately, when students changed their minds about the module selection, the changes that are made in TechSys still need to be manually captured in the ITS SMS. Again an area for errors to occur.

​

The exiting news is that for January 2019, all changes after the initial registration will be transferred to the ITS SMS. This is due to the implementation of phase two of the registration API.

​

Less registration time and stress; more contact time for teaching!

bottom of page