The Asian Institute of Medicine, Science and Technology (AIMST)

Case Study

Introduction

The Asian Institute of Medicine, Science and Technology (AIMST) will have their new campus at the sprawling 230 - acre site at the foothills of Gunung Jerai in the historically important Bujang valley in Semeling, Kedah. The campus will be self-contained and equipped with state-of-the-art teaching and laboratory facilities, purpose-built student and staff residences, a student complex replete with facilities such as bank, post office, student clinic, book store, computer shop and mini-market.

At the present stage of its operations, three faculties have been established especially Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Faculty of Engineering and Computeand Computer Technology and the Faculty of Applied Sciences. The University has also established the Centre for Matriculation and Foundation Studies. The Matriculation programme run by the Centre is modelled on the South Australian Matriculation which provides a mode of entry into the various degree programmes for students meeting the respective admission criteria. Students just failing to meet admission requirements into the Medical degree programme may be selectively admitted into the one-year Pre-Medical programme run by the Centre, the course work of which parallels that of the first year of the Biotechnology programme under the Faculty of Applied Sciences. Imbued with the vision of its founders, AIMST aims to be a premier private sector university in the country and region catering to the needs of local and international students in providing quality technical education at an affordable price. The curricula for most of the degree programmes are drawn from the University of Bristol in Britain.

Challenge and Solutions

The University Management System (UMS) n-tier architecture with object-oriented components and .NET framework are designed to the complexities of dynamic business requirements. The UMS for AIMST includes the Student Admission Management, Course Management, Exam and Assessment Management, Student Accounting System, Student Portal, Hostel Management System and Facility Management System. This involves the bulk of the backroom transaction processing workload. AIMST faced the challenge of efficiently maintaining the management information pertaining to it students. This requirement raised the demand for an efficient and effective solution with rich functionalities to maintain diverse requirements at the operational, tactical and strategic level of management. Managing and monitoring student fee and related costs is a vital task for the university administration.

UMS provides a flexible fee management system by maintaining a ledger for each student coupled with auto posting facilities, which is executed on a batch basis at the beginning of each semester. Sponsors like Perbadanan Tabung Pendidikan Tinggi Nasional (PTPTN) and other funding agencies will fund the majority of the student’s educational expenses. Thus maintenance of this information and the ability to link seamlessly with this third party interface is a vital task and UMS caters to this efficiently.

The UMS supports the development of academic programs and scheduling of subjects. The university has to maintain a lot of data in each academic subject. This system provides the faculties with the maintenance of a subject centric database thus eliminating operational workload and improving administrative excellence.

The UMS supports the co-ordination of the approved subjects with optimal capacity planning of available resources (lecturers, laboratories, classrooms, equipment etc.). This Student Admission and Management System helps the students to register the appropriate subjects for each program and check for the prerequisites. Support is given for online subject registration based on the subjects offered for the current semester. The UMS supports withdrawal of subject / program with the provision for calculating the withdrawal amount to the student based on the withdrawal policy, which can be maintained in the system.

The UMS also supports student deferment where by a student can be deferred when the student wishes to temporarily withdraw from the program for a short period. In the UMS, Assessment and Examination System supports the registration of students' assessment, examination results and qualifications. In addition to the above it will provide management information regarding the progress of students, percentage of students graduated, attendance information for a subject, drop out rate and results per subject or semester wise both offline and online.

The Student Portal System provides complete online information to the student on their academic information related to exam & assessment, finance details, class schedules and subject scheduling for the current semester.

The Facility Management System permits user to set various master files for various facilities provided to the students. The students, faculty and the staff are able to register the available facilities online.

Benefits

• The UMS is engineered to incorporate new levels of collaborative services and to deliver personalization information to disparate users. It is designed ready for rapid integration with existing management applications.
• Accelerates mission critical operations and management functions to increase overall functionality.
• Enables the processing of real-time student transactions to eliminate complex accounting work.
• The student accounting module accommodates the way the institutions approach the business of education and the timely maintenance of individual student accounting ledgers in a systematic manner.
• Integrates data mining capabilities that provide the accessibility of real time key performances indexes for strategic decision-making.
• Facilitates students to access the portal to register the courses online and to view other related information.
• Facilitates students to access the facilities offered to them through online. Facility Management System is a complete integrated solution for the university to manage the booking information. This will help the university to reduce their workload immensely.