eBasta

(Student Module)

by

Muhammad Bilal Asif 12K-3409

Spring 2014

An eBasta submitted in fulfillment of the requirement

for the degree of

MS (Software Project Management)

Department of Computer Science

National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences

2014

eBasta

Submitted by: Muhammad Bilal Asif, 12k-3409Colloquium: 13.06.2014 - Spring 2014

Supervisor: Murad AliSignature:

Co-Supervisor: Prof.Dr. Zubair ShaikhSignature:

Department of Computer Science

National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences

Karachi Campus

Declaration of Originality

eBasta:

I certify that this work is free of plagiarism and all materials appearing in this report have been properly quoted and attributed.

Further, I certify that I am the sole author of this report and that no part of this report has been published or submitted for publication.

I declare that this is a true copy of my report, including any final revisions, as approved by my supervisor and the thesis committee, and that this report has not been submitted for a higher degree to any other University or Institution.

______________________________________Name and Signature of the Student

______________________________________Date (day/month/year)

Acknowledgements

Firstly I am thankful to Almighty Allah, and then to Assistant Professor Murad Ali who has been very responsive and helpful all the way and provided necessary information and help whenever possible for completion of the project. Moreover, want to show my deep gratitude to Professor Dr. Zubair Shaikh for his guidance and motivation for this project

My thanks and appreciations also go to my friends & colleagues in helping me within their domain knowledge and honestly helping me out with their abilities.

Abstract

eBasta is idea from our supervisor to facilitate current learning system in our schools. This will be a solution and new way of learning for the masses. All the problems being faced by the stakeholders of the current school system served as the motivational factors to come-up with “eBasta” learning system. The intention of this project is to facilitate the existing education system that is being used in schools all over the Pakistan. By using mobile technology, eBasta intends to automate and upgrade all the key functions of the school learning process.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1............................................................................................................................................................1

Introduction....................................................................................................................................................1

Chapter 2............................................................................................................................................................2

Related Work..................................................................................................................................................2

1) i-Education.............................................................................................................................................2

2) TabPilot Tablet Manager........................................................................................................................2

3) Radix.......................................................................................................................................................2

4) NetSupport School Student for Android.................................................................................................3

Chapter 3............................................................................................................................................................4

Vision..............................................................................................................................................................4

Scope..............................................................................................................................................................4

eBasta High Level Architecture.......................................................................................................................5

System Diagram..............................................................................................................................................5

System Flow Diagram.....................................................................................................................................6

Student Module Flow Diagram.......................................................................................................................7

List of Features...............................................................................................................................................8

Student Module..........................................................................................................................................8

Teacher Module.........................................................................................................................................8

Admin Module............................................................................................................................................8

Parents Module..........................................................................................................................................8

Key Users of eBasta system............................................................................................................................9

Key Stakeholders of eBasta system................................................................................................................9

Challenges and Risk........................................................................................................................................9

High Risk.....................................................................................................................................................9

Medium Risk...............................................................................................................................................9

Low Risk......................................................................................................................................................9

Mitigation of Risk..........................................................................................................................................10

UML-Diagrams..............................................................................................................................................11

Use Cases..................................................................................................................................................11

Entity Relation Diagram - ERD..................................................................................................................15

Database Schema.........................................................................................................................................16

Specifications of Hardware Recommended..................................................................................................18

Tools and Technologies................................................................................................................................19

Technologies used for the student module..............................................................................................19

Description of some technologies used........................................................................................................20

1) Hibernate ORM.................................................................................................................................20

2) Jackson.............................................................................................................................................22

3) Jersey................................................................................................................................................22

Chapter 4..........................................................................................................................................................24

Results..........................................................................................................................................................24

eBasta – Login screen...............................................................................................................................24

eBasta – Home.........................................................................................................................................25

eBasta – My Subjects................................................................................................................................25

eBasta – <Subject>...................................................................................................................................26

eBasta – Textbook....................................................................................................................................26

eBasta – Workbook..................................................................................................................................27

eBasta – Workbook Editor........................................................................................................................27

eBasta – Workbook Editor (Writing with keyboard)................................................................................28

eBasta – Workbook Editor (Writing with stylus)......................................................................................28

eBasta – Workbook Editor........................................................................................................................29

eBasta – Daily Diary..................................................................................................................................29

eBasta – Daily Activity (MQC Activity)......................................................................................................30

eBasta – Daily Activity (True/False Activity).............................................................................................30

eBasta – Daily Activity (Fill in the blank)...................................................................................................31

eBasta – Results........................................................................................................................................31

Chapter 5..........................................................................................................................................................32

Conclusions and Future Work.......................................................................................................................32

References........................................................................................................................................................33

Chapter 1

Introduction

As this is the era of innovations and technological advancements and gradually every field is adopting the technology for producing better results. Most popular and easily accessible technology now days are smart-phones and tablets, which have inspired and being adopted by many aspects.

Whether school is from public sector or private sector they all follow same traditional way of teaching and students also are use too of these system. Typical class includes black/white boards, books, copies, attendance register, stationary etc. In this system we are focusing on drawbacks of the current system and want to enhance the learning process while facilitating all the actors primarily that are teachers, students and parents.

eBasta is intended to enhance effectiveness of teaching process, improving learning experience of students by giving exposure to extra-curricular learning material, students progress and activity monitoring by their parents, better communication among parents, teachers & school administration, Up-to-date course material availability, less dependency on published hard copies of course material, better portability and reducing burden of student bags. Teachers can effectively check and update marks on the go.

This project is divided into 3 members and the module is assigned to each member by the supervisor but at the end the all modules will be integrated and consolidated and will become fully functional “eBasta” school learning system. The modules are student, teacher, parent and administrative module.

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Chapter 2

Related Work

1) i-EducationThe school management software has following sections.

1. Student/Parents 2. Teachers/Class teachers 3. Admin/Principal/Data Entry

Main Features:

Assignments, Homework , Tutorials, Exam Schedule, Student/Teachers Profile, Online leave application, Buy books/ apparels online, Discussion Forum / Message Board, Internal Messaging System

Reference Link:http://synowebtech.com/edu

2) TabPilot Tablet ManagerTabPilot is a cloud-based management system that puts teachers in control of entire sets of classroom tablets. TabPilot removes distractions by locking down tablets so that students only see teacher-selected apps and web links. Manage and distribute apps, web links, and content.

Reference Link:http://www.tabpilot.com/

3) Radix

Present Broadcast teacher’s screen Broadcast video Present a selected student's screen Apply on-screen annotation Integrate with demonstration equipments

Teach View students’ raised hands Open a collaborative whiteboard Allow in-class chat and discussion center Take full remote control over students' device

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Manage Execute a pre-planned lesson agenda Open and co-browse web pages with students Display messages Lock student screens Assess students' achievement Block Internet and certain applications.

Operate Turn student devices on and off remotely. Restart students devices remotely. Log on/off student devices remotely. Auto reconnect students to the class network. Send and collect files to and from the students. Install applications remotely. View battery status.

Reference Link:http://www.radix-int.com/Classroom-Management/Tablet-Classroom-Management-Software.html

4) NetSupport School Student for AndroidNetSupport School Student for Android gives teachers the power to connect to each student in a NetSupport School managed classroom, enabling real-time interaction and support.

Key features:

Student Register Connecting to Students Lesson Objectives Sending Messages Chat Requesting Help Class Surveys Lock Screen Show Screen Configuration Options

Reference Link:http://www.netsupportschool.com/tablets.asp

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Chapter 3

VisionThe vision of eBasta System is to change the way students, teachers and parents think of school today. eBasta system will replace student’s heavy bags, loaded with notebooks and textbooks with Tablets. Student will have all his/her study material in his tablet including Textbooks, Workbooks, Daily Dairy, Timetable and Results. Moreover, student/teachers attendance management, Interschool communication, integrating school branches with each other and ultimately integrating the school system directly to the government authority like board of secondary education.

ScopeeBasta System will provide a close collaboration among Teachers, Students, Parents and School Administration. Admin and Parents will be provided with the Web portal. While teacher, students will be interacting with the Android Application. System includes all the basic features that are necessary to perform students learning process seamlessly while supporting other daily class tasks like creating class activities and checking students submissions by teacher. Reading, writing and giving exams by students. Admin registering and updating all basic information like classes, students, teachers and assigning subjects to teachers, reading parents’ feedbacks. And parents giving feedback and monitoring their children progress. The intended students for eBasta are those studying in grade 3 through 8.

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eBasta High Level Architecture

System Diagram

eBasta

Parent

TeacherStudent

Admin

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System Flow Diagram

6

Student Module Flow Diagram

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List of Features

Student Module Student shall check their daily homework dairy Students shall do homework with their tablet (hand writing) Students will be able to give quiz Students can check their class time table Student can read the material & books provided by teacher Moreover, can surf internet for related material

Teacher Module Teacher can prepare & dispatch daily homework dairy Teacher can check students homework in notebook (hand writing) Teacher can update marks in mark-sheet Teacher can make objective and subjective quiz. Teacher can check quiz and update marks in mark-sheet Teacher can communicate better with colleagues and student through email Assignments can be submitted online by students which will be available to the respective

Teachers for review

Admin Module Admin shall create time table Admin shall register students Shall create class Shall add/update/delete student in class Admin shall assign courses to teachers Admin shall review parents feedback

Parents Module

Parents shall provide remarks on teachers Parents can check student’s progress report Parents can send receive their valuable feedbacks to school administration

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Key Users of eBasta system

STUDENT: Use the system to register for course or view academic history.

TEACHER: Use the system to create class assignments, dispatch daily dairy, check and update marks for student submissions

ADMINISTRATOR: Setup School, classes, teachers and students in the system

PARENTS: Use the system to monitor their children progress in school, give feedback and stay up-to-date with the student’s information

Key Stakeholders of eBasta system

GOVERNMENTAUTHORITY: They can use the system to update new content or add new course material to the current course content

DEVELOPMENT TEAM: include all software engineers, business analysts, system analysts, system designers, implementers, testers, QA, project manager and supervisors.

Challenges and Risk

High Risk

Interfaces and web services are being written by each member independently to satisfy its need but as the Database is same. Bugs are injected for other modules to work properly

All team members need to spare time for academics, especially before exams of other courses

Medium Risk

Components developed separately cannot be integrated easily, requiring redesign and rework.

Team members need extra time to learn unfamiliar tools or techniques. Although the scope is in written and approved but when implementing it, it starts expanding

as new outcomes and situations are emerged that need to be handled in order to make system error free hence extending delivery time

Low Risk

Lack of experiences in software project management, especially in testing, verification, validation, risks management and change management

No substitution if any team member cannot continue to contribute to the project. As our project is divided into 3 modules and each is dependent on other to perform well

Development time is limited tentatively to 2 months only. Hence the pressure is really high. Development team cannot deliver the components quickly after review. And time must be

added to improve quality. Conflicts among team members’ ideas results in poor performances, more meeting, and

extra rework. Student’s and Teacher’s Tablets will need to be charged in the classroom. Less tech-savvy society shows non-flexible and less adaptive attitude towards the system

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Mitigation of Risk[

To cope with the time problem we decided to meet on every weekend and in evening whenever possible and work on nights.

To overcome the problem of communication we used Skype and emails.

We configured the Server and DB connectivity on each member machines, so we can easily work on our places and complete individual modules gradually.

Most prominent issue of consistency in our Database we sit together to create pilot schema of eBasta. Then onwards whoever alter tables or add new table for their needs they send “change script” to each other to replicate the changes for consistency.

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UML-Diagrams

Use Cases

eBasta System

11

Admin

12

Student

13

Teacher

Parent

14

Entity Relation Diagram - ERD

15

Database Schema

16

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Specifications of Hardware Recommended

As it was decided in the scope that our eBasta needs to meet the our local industry so it has to be cost effective also for which we heads up to Android platform as it is open-source and the Android Tablet is available in different specs and brands starting from just PKR 8000.

Android Tablet minimal specs to run the App properly are as follows:

Android OS version 4 or higher 512 DDR RAM WIFI Support Upto 7 hours stand by battery life

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Tools and Technologies

Technologies used for the student module

Back-end:i) Programming Language:

(1) Java

ii) SDKs:(1) JDK 1.7

iii) Database:(1) MySQL 5

iv) IDEs:(1) Eclipse-Kepler for JavaEE(2) MySQL Workbench

v) Server:(1) Apache Tomcat

vi) Frameworks:(a) Hibernate ORM(b) Jackson(c) Jersey

Front-end:i) IDE:

(1) ADT-22.6.2 (Android development Toolkit)(2) Droid Draw

ii) SDK:(1) Android SDK

iii) Programming Language:(1) Java

iv) Liberary (1) GSON

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Description of some technologies used

1) Hibernate ORMHibernate-ORM: This is an object relationship model. In this project we are using Hibernate as a middleware to better communicate between student-teacher by connecting the Database to the web service.

Hibernate's primary feature is mapping from Java classes to database tables (and from Java data types to SQL data types). Hibernate also provides data query and retrieval facilities.

Teacher.java: Above is the Java file for a teacher entity that is being used in the App for updating and retrieving teacher entity.

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Teacher.hbm.xml: XML file for the teacher entity that holds all the data types of the properties and their mapping to the related data base field in the relevant table. Moreover, it also holds the relations between the teacher entity and others if it exists.

hibernate.cfg.xml: hibernate configuration file where the path and credentials are defined to connect with the data base.

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2) Jackson

The Jackson is a multi-purpose Java library for processing JSON data format. Jackson aims to be the best possible combination of fast, correct, lightweight, and ergonomic for developers.

Jackson's maps JSON data into plain old Java objects ("POJOs").

For example, given JSON data:

{ "name" : { "first" : "Ali", "last" : "Ahmed" }, "gender" : "MALE", "verified" : false, "userImage" : "Rm9vYmFyIQ==" }

It takes two lines of Java to turn it into a User instance:

ObjectMapper mapper =new ObjectMapper();// can reuse, share globally User user = mapper.readValue(new File("user.json"), User.class);

Where the User class looks something like this

publicclass User {

publicenum Gender { MALE, FEMALE };

publicstaticclass Name {

private String _first, _last;

public String getFirst(){return _first;}

public String getLast(){return _last;}

publicvoid setFirst(String s){ _first = s;}

publicvoid setLast(String s){ _last = s;}

}

3) Jersey

Java API for RESTful Web Services is a Java programming language API that provides support in creating web services according to the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural pattern

It provides some annotations to aid in mapping a resource class (a POJO) as a web resource. The annotations include:

@Path specifies the relative path for a resource class or method. @GET, @PUT, @POST, @DELETE and @HEAD specify the HTTP request type of a resource. @Produces specifies the response Internet media types (used for content negotiation). @Consumes specifies the accepted request Internet media types.

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Above shows the use of Jackson style annotations like @Get, @Path, @Produces. This method creates a RESTful method, which can be accessed with directly giving path that is defined in the @Path annotation in the URL. It checks the given username and password provided in the parameters and produces JSON response in return that is defined in the @Produces annotation.

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Chapter 4

Results

eBasta – Login screen Student will login through this screen.

To increase the understandability of user id ‘ST’ prefix used here for Students.

There are no checks involved related to prefix.

Student will be required to connect to internet to be able to login for the first time. Than afterwards no internet is required until student changes its user id or password.

Figure 1: Login Screen

Figure 2: Login Screen - Connecting

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eBasta – HomeAfter logging in student will land to this screen. This is eBasta Home screen.

From here student will navigate to other screens including Subjects, Daily Diary, time Table, Results and Notifications.

eBasta – My SubjectsAfter selecting Subjects from Home screen student will land here. This screen provides all the subjects in which student is enrolled according to his/her class.

Figure 3: eBasta - Home

Figure 4: eBasta - Subjects

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eBasta – <Subject>This is the eBasta – <Subject> screen. The <Subject> will be replaced with the selected subject.

Each subject provide these two options. Subject’s Textbook and Subject’s Workbook.

On selecting Textbook, subject’s textbook will be downloaded from the eBasta server once.

On selecting Workbook, subject’s workbook will be opened. Here student can view his/her saved notes, create new notes, perform homework and can submit homework to teacher.

eBasta – TextbookHere student can read his/her textbook in pdf formate.

Figure 5: eBasta - <Subject>

Figure 6: eBasta - Textbook

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eBasta – WorkbookThis is one of the major screen of eBasta student application. On selecting Workbook in EBasta - <Subject> student will land here.

This screen will provide history of student’s saved notes and subjective assignments.

Each list item will have his title and created date.

Student can create new notes, open saved notes, edit saved notes and delete notes.

eBasta – Workbook EditorAfter selecting a note on workbook or clicking on New Note Button this EBasta – Workbook Editor will be open.

Student can provide Title of the note, otherwise note will be created with a default title.

Created date will be automatically marked.

Student can write text in Writing Area either by keyboard or by writing freehand by using Stylus pen.

Figure 7: eBasta - Workbook

Figure 8: eBasta Workbook Editor

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eBasta – Workbook Editor (Writing with keyboard)Student can write text by using keyboard.

eBasta – Workbook Editor (Writing with stylus)Student can write freehand by using stylus pen.

Figure 9: eBasta - Workbook Editor (Writing with keyboard)

Figure 10: eBasta - Workbook Editor (Writing with stylus pen)

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eBasta – Workbook EditorAfter finishing assignment student can submit it to teacher by pressing ‘Submit’ button or can save by pressing ‘Save’ button and submit later on.

eBasta – Daily DiaryThis is the Student’s Daily diary. All activities assigned by the teachers for current day are listed here.

Each list item shows Type of activity on lift and subject name on the right.

Student can attempt an activity by selecting it from this list.

Figure 11: eBasta - Workbook Editor (Save and Submit)

Figure 12: eBasta - Daily Diary

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eBasta – Daily Activity (MQC Activity)After selecting an activity from the eBasta – Daily Diary student will land here to perform that activity according to that activity type.

Some of the activities which can be assigned are,

MQC Activity True/False Activity Fill in the blank Essay writing Question and Answer.

eBasta – Daily Activity (True/False Activity)After selecting activity from eBasta – Daily Diary student will be landed to True/False activity.

Figure 13: eBasta - Daily Activity

Figure 14: eBasta - Daily Activity (True/False)

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eBasta – Daily Activity (Fill in the blank)After selecting activity from eBasta – Daily Diary student will be landed to Fill in the blank.

eBasta – ResultseBasta – Results provides the updated results when ever student want to check his result.

Overall Class %: Is the student’s percentage including all subjects in the class.

Student can also check each Activity’s result on activity result list.

The Cumulative Activities % provides student individual performance regarding all activities which student has performed or was unable to perform.

Figure 15 : eBasta - Daily activity (Fill in the blank)

Figure 16: eBasta - Results

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Chapter 5

Conclusions and Future Work

Following are the tentative task which can be covered to make this project more comprehensive product for e-Learning and

o Parents can also view the assignments submitted by their child through Web.o Attendance management along with gestures or any other identification.o Capturing teacher, student picture in registration process.o Teachers can view leave status/balances and submit leave requests online.o The system will provide result sheet, attendance sheet and exam time table in pdf or excel

format, which allow the students/parents to print or download it.o Students will be able to take lectures from home through VOIP and history of lectures will

shall be maintained

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References

http://synowebtech.com/edu

http://www.tabpilot.com/

http://www.radix-int.com/Classroom-Management/Tablet-Classroom-Management-Software.html

http://www.developer.android.com

chrome-extension: Postman

https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

https://jersey.java.net/

https://jackson.codehaus.org/

https://hibernate.org/orm/

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