Design And Implementation Of A Web-Based Dashboard For Monitoring Academic Personnel Performance

CHAPTER ONE

1.0                                                        INTRODUCTION

1.1                                                    Background of study

Education is an indispensable system on which the life of everyone is built and as well stimulates the entire life application.  It could be referred to as a process designed for the acquisition and dissemination of skills and knowledge to the posterity of the nation.  The identified system tends to be implemented in diverse dimensions basically in schools.

For the past ten years, it has been discovered that schools are not what they were as attributed to the wide ranging changes which have occurred and brought new pressure associated with increased size.  On the account of this, an increasing complexity of organization has been instigated so that stresses and anxieties of choice have been added to those of dimension.

The competent educational administration constitute the intensity of education and its impediments mount a disturbing diffusion and obscuring of purpose and all these changes concede with their performance.

The data related to these activities with the participation of personnel are facts and information resulting from academic activities [1]. The data of a faculty refers to the information linked with the academic performance of its professors and lecturers, such as the details of academic services and contributions, courses completed, the number of annual research publications, and the number of committees in which the faculty member is a member.

Although the collection, management, and reporting of faculty data are crucial for each faculty member, as well as for the institution itself as a complete establishment, numerous gaps exist in this area (Bland et al., 2012). While a faculty member may be involved in several activities, most of these activities are not documented and recognized because the university lacks a central system for effectively recording these data and presenting a comprehensive report of such activities and performance feedback (Moore, 2015). Currently, different independent systems host faculty data. The lack of internal communication between these systems causes these data to be enclosed in a contained silo. Retrieving data from multiple systems is often a manual and, of course, difficult process for representatives and faculty members. Since these data are not analyzed or merged, their trends and inter-relationships cannot be exploited, which is a lost opportunity to discover information and extract knowledge (Lewis et al., 2017). Currently, the data recording section is inadequate in most higher education institutions, and there is partial automation in terms of recording and sharing data between different systems. Therefore, faculty members and managers should spend a lot of time and effort in manual data entry to gather or track the details of academic activities and their assessments. Despite the fact that the manual entering of data is unavoidable in some cases, automation and interoperability between systems can prevent the duplicate recording of data. In addition, faculty members have inadequate time and skills to perform statistical analyses on data (e.g., findings correlations, etc.) and extrapolate valuable interpretations, targeted feedback, or practical complementary objectives (Hora et al., 2017). As a data management tool, dashboards are one of the most effective and renowned forms of data objectification (Hora et al., 2017).

A dashboard can be defined as: “a tool for visualization that provides the possibility for acquiring awareness, finding trends, planning, and real comparisons. These items are repeatedly embodied in a simple and functional user interface. A dashboard of accumulated data effectively presents multiple sources and a comprehensive summary of important information that can be assimilated by faculty members at a glance (Hora et al., 2017). Performance dashboards enable organizations to measure, monitor, and manage business performance more effectively. They build on foundations of business intelligence and data integration infrastructure, and are used for monitoring, analysis, and management (Eckerson et al., 2010).

Developing a faculty performance dashboard is useful for quickly sharing with academic members information about their performance in a way that requires minimal effort and helps them better understand the data (Faiola et al., 2015). Observing and interpreting the data presented in large tables and lengthy reports are exhausting and time-consuming for faculty members. In other words, a dashboard, if designed Page 4/9 appropriately, can help faculty members spot their strengths and areas of progress and identify the trends and steps necessary for improvement (Faiola et al., 2015). Based on the researcher’s explorations, there are substantial gaps in the reporting and management of faculty data. Therefore, it seems necessary to develop a comprehensive dashboard for monitoring the performance of educational groups and faculty members.

1.2      Problem statement

A final year project (FYP) subject for a particular university’s course would need a specific management system to alleviate the work processes of supervision and monitor student progress. Having a system to process and store information securely is crucial for an e-learning environment in a higher learning institute. Manually recording of data is deemed unsuitable as it may lead to mishandling of documents, poor record of documents movements, and even missing documents. In order to overcome this challenge, this system was developed. This system would reduce cost, paperwork, staffing and even simplify the workflow process.

1.3      Aims and objectives

The main aim of this study is to design a functional web-based dashboard for monitoring the academic personnel performance.

The objectives of the system are as follows:

• To produce a reliable system that would monitor performance of an academic personnel.
• To produce a flexible and comprehensive system that would meet up with the future development in the school.
• To design and develop a computerized system that would managedata records related to the performance and activities of the faculty

1.4      Scope of study

The scope of this work covers designing a web-based dashboard for monitoring the performance and activities of an academic personnel which will leads to better monitoring, identification of weaknesses and strengths, and, ultimately, promotion of the performance of the faculty. In fact, the dashboard is a data management tool that can be used for monitoring and evaluating a faculty’s performance.

1.5      Significance of study

Web-based dashboard is ananalytical tools that provide a centralized view of relevant key performance indicatorin real time.The implementation of this computerized system would definitely stimulate the school standard.  This would as well help the management to ease the burden on the staff which would be for the benefit of students and staffs.  It is also a basic study of research and for the entire populace and future researchers. The use of the System has numerous significance and this can be enumerated as follows:

1. This study will prevent mishandling of documents,
2. poor record of documents movements,

• and even missing documents.

1.6      Methodology

This is a mixed methods study with sequential mixed designs that will be conducted in four main phases. In the first phase, all the resources related to the functional dashboard are reviewed in order to identify its operational requirements. In the second phase, the requirements and necessities of the software are determined by both qualitative (interview) and quantitative (Delphi) methods. In this phase, eight people will be interviewed during the qualitative phase, and thematic analysis will be used to analyze the data. For the quantitative step, the two- round Delphi technique will be conducted by the purposeful selection of 21 individuals. In the third phase, code writing of the software is performed using C-Sharp programming language in the Visual Studio environment. Finally, 15 people among faculty members and managers, who are users of the dashboard software, are selected to evaluate the software. Users’ satisfaction with the dashboard software is assessed using the Dashboard Assessment Usability Model. The data will be analyzed using descriptive statistics and SPSS version 21 software