WEB-BASED STUDENT ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT

SYSTEM

CHAPTER 2
LITERATURE REVIEW

2.0 INTRODUCTION
The chapter describes the review of available literature on the study conducted as

well as defining related works undertaken by others and also describing the

conceptual framework of the system, its important and limitations.

2.1 Student Association Definition

A student is a person who has registered for a course or program that would earn

them university credit, according to the University of Florida (2012). Participation

in student Associations is a good resource for students' personal development in

colleges and universities (McCluskey-Titus, 2003). Many college and university

students establish student groups and organizations for reasons other than just for

fun. According to Wikipedia, an association is a collection of people who make a

commitment to establish a body or organization to achieve a goal. Usually, they

act as volunteers. Additionally, students aspire to acquire knowledge, abilities, and

competencies related to their chosen profession. Theory suggests that engagement

in extracurricular is clearly linked to the development of skills, knowledge, and

complicated interpersonal interactions (Hood, 1984) It is essential to acknowledge

the role that student organizations play in assisting students in becoming prepared

for the profession and to investigate how they do so. Also, studies have revealed

and documented the effect that involvement in student associations and groups has

on a student's growth (McCluskey-Titus, 2003). Examining the lessons kids take

away from participating in student organizations aids in assessing and justifying

 the value of the programs and services provided. This helps to show the benefits of

a specific program or service offered by student organizations. However, these

findings or outcomes might be applied to enhance programs and services

(McCluskey-Titus, 2003). There are currently various different student

associations registered and/or recognized across the university's college campuses,

usually acting as a crucial mechanism for creating opportunities for student

learning.

2.1.1 Benefits of Student Association

Student organizations give members the fundamental knowledge and skills they

need to improve their competitiveness during the course of their careers. The time

and effort students invest in college and university events and programs is referred

to as effective teaching (Astin, 1984). Students may get a deeper knowledge of the

conceptual topic that supports their learning experience through formal and

informal interaction between their experiences.

Students have the chance to socialize with their peers in both institutional and

casual settings thanks to Student Associations. Dunkel, Bray, and Wofford (1989)

argued that involvement in Student Associations increases one's marketability as

much as, if not more than; grade point average in many fields when students

graduate school and enter the job market. This is because involvement in student

organizations is often seen as an indication of one's interpersonal skills and

leadership ability.

Student associations should be acknowledged as an effective and beneficial

teaching strategy since they unite students of like minds to participate in activities

that are important to their future careers. Students can acquire vital leadership,

management, and understanding from this, making it a significant foundation of

self-growth for them.

2.1.2 DOMAIN RESEARCH

Domain research is a normal research on similar previous project that can be

helpful. Domain research includes comparison between the already existing

project base on the projects’ features in order to achieve the best design for the

Student Association Management system. The research will analyse the previous

projects and discuss the researchers’ recommendations in order to prevent the

pervious project mistakes and in that way the proposed design will minimize or

prevent the problems. A management system is a set of policies, processes and

procedures used by an organization to ensure that it can fulfill the tasks required to

achieve its objectives.

2.1.2 Findings by Others and Similar Projects

Over the last few years management systems have advanced rapidly which has

fasten organizational, intuitions, colleges, University and others in terms of their

way of life thereby creating efficiency and effectiveness in how they are able to

Plan and control tasks thereby facilitating them to make decisions for the

institutions better since Decision in college are based on data such as students

result, inventory level and other quantities factors. Data are also facts, events, and

transactions and so on. It is only after these data have been examined; compared,

classified and summarized do they become useable information. In a study

conducted by (Reuben, 2019) for the implementation of a Student Information

Management System (SIMS) developed for Joseph Ayo Babalola University. It

was implemented with the use of an object-oriented programming language,

Visual Basic 6.0, and a database application, Microsoft Access. These

development tools are what make up the student information management system.
It was placed on a local intranet, local to the educational institution making use of

it, and was built as a desktop application for Windows® Desktop OS only. With

student information management system, a user-friendly interface was introduced

to make it easy for students’ records to be stored in a database, and easily retrieved

from the database. A username and password is used to login in order to gain

access to the full application. The system provided the following features, Easy

storage of students’ records, easy editing of students’ records and Easy deletion of

students’ records whenever necessary and minimal loss of information due to the

backup dialog contained in the application. The shortcomings were that it only

provided access to an administrator to manage the records and was only used to

manage student records. Other educational processes such as course registration

and results provision were not feasible using the system

Agarwal, Singh & Raghav (2020) presented the Department Management system

which system is a web-based application accessed throughout the department of an

organization. This system may be used for monitoring the overall activities as well

as the performance of the students. This work has been developed to maintain and

facilitate easy access to information. For this, the users must be registered with the

system after which they can access as well as modify data as per the permissions

given to them. It was implemented using C#, .Net and SQL Server. The system as

presented had functionalities like Notice Board, Library, Timetable, and

Download Notes and Assignments. The system was limited due to the database's

inability to accept new data as a result of the limited amount of data storage of in

the database management system as deployed to handle the web system. In future

work, they said they want to implement a Chabot system, a user-friendly interface,

and the Development of a Mobile Application.

Deju (2019) et al, proposed the Design and Implementation for a Student

Information paper which describes the system's functional and architectural design

and emphasizes the system's functionality, database design and functional

modules, etc. A fully functional, flexible and convenient application and friendly

interface provide a good guarantee for student information management. This was

implemented using Microsoft Office Access, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)

and Microsoft Jet Database Engine. The intranet was a limitation to the system due

to the non-accessibility of users to gather or access information or data

everywhere, they are in that sense drawback to the University for their data to be

accessed on the intranet within the campus premises and not on the internet, also,

due to financial restrictions; a physical server was unavailable for use for testing

the application before the presentation. For this purpose, a localized network

between PCs was used. Hence it recommended for future works, due to financial

restrictions, a physical server was unavailable for use for testing the application

before a presentation.

Sied, Mohammed, Negussie & Kemal (2013) et al proposed a Student Information

Management System which provides users with a simple, and efficient way of

maintaining student information. It can be used by educational institutions or

colleges to maintain the records of students easily. Achieving this objective is

difficult using a paper-based system as the information scattered can be redundant

and collecting relevant information may be very time-consuming. The study uses

tools like Notepad++ and VISIO, data sources like site observation, interview and
 document analysis, and for design methodology we use object-oriented. For the

analysis model, we use DFD, sequence and activity diagram. The limitation of the

system was due to the limited storage size of student data in Microsoft Access

which gets corrupted as more data gets added therefore rendering the system

unavailable. Upon recommendations, student data available in Microsoft Access

will be migrated to MySQL to store a large number of records and render the

system available.

2.1.3 Filling in the Gaps and Limitations of Previous Works

Over the years, previous researchers and developers have faced some shortages,

challenges, and limitations while developing and researching other similar

information and management systems. Notwithstanding, they have been able to

overcome these by maximizing the issues in developing efficient management

systems which are now used in firms, institutions, universities, and colleges to

facilitate decision-making. Despite the specific benefits to Management systems, a

specialist within the IT fraternity argue about the protection and performance

issues of the World Wide Web are the main disadvantages to the web system,

especially since Internet service is a not free technology (chargeable). DNS,

firewall, and network connectivity are problems of a web-based system that are

crucial for access and productivity, Troublesome third-party services in this sense

experience a stalled page waiting to load an ad from someone else’s ad server and

it may suffer from service attack and different kind of viruses. people may not be

able to use devices or tools used for web-based systems, especially mobile phones

or laptops. Some people may not able to purchase the device or tools which may

deny them the right of accessing the web-based application.

 Although kinds of viruses can do huge harm to the system, using a specific

operating system, the server can easily be secured against the viruses. But PCs and

cell phones may not provide enough security and are easily attacked by the virus.

These viruses may attack the computer, the cell phone, the internet, the operating

system, and the control unit of the system. Inconsistent User Interface thus keep in

mind that many users are in a hurry when scrolling through your web application,

so mirroring the design and layout from page to page will be key to guiding your

users throughout the page, also unoptimized databases can destroy a production

application. Missing indexes slow down the performance of SQL queries, which

can drag down the entire site.

As the above points which been presented and dissection indicating a variety of

technologies in different web-based management systems, applications have been

used to develop and design related systems as they can be used in, organizations,

universities as well as colleges. Much research has been conducted to improve

upon these systems and reduce the errors that may occur during the usage process.

As management systems have become so vital in this era of digitalization that

these systems aid in the decision-making process within the organization. The goal

of the researcher these days is to increase the efficiency, flexibility,

responsiveness, and interactive-ness of these web-based systems which will tend

to quicken the decision-making process of the organization. With this, we will

deploy tools like MySQL, Bootstrap, Visual Studio, JavaScript, PHP, HTML and

CSS in other to carry out the said task.

2.2 Web Content Management System

An organization can manage digital information on a website using a web content

management system (WCMS), a type of content management system (CMS), by

 developing and managing material without prior knowledge of web programming

or mark-up languages. The organization can benefit from managing web content

properly by getting useful information for decision, getting benefits, and

enhancing. Some features of WCMS include:

 Gives administrators the ability to control who has access to a page on a site

 Gives users the ability to extend a site's functionality with plugins or modules

 The ability to design, create and maintain personalized content for a website.

 Enables users to create and customize content, such as adding titles and headers to

improve content structure, or designing webpages with drag-and-drop tools

 Keeps the WCMS up to current web standards by updating software

2.3 World Wide Web and Internet

The terms “internet” and “World Wide Web” may seem interchangeable at first. In

everyday conversation, they serve the same purpose, though the latter hasn’t been

used much in recent years but the fact is that both terms are different meaning in

terms of meaning. Philip Emeagwali (1999) puts it, “the internet is the greatest of

all networks, the network of several networks (usually local network in its pool).

The internet was not invented in 1993 by a single individual, as is widely believed.

The internet is product of a succession of inventions that occurred in the 1970s and

80s while The World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW or the Web) is an

information space where documents and other web resources are identified by

Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), interlinked by hypertext links, and can be

accessed via the Internet. English scientist Tim Berners- Lee invented the World

Wide Web in 1989. The two terms describe different concepts, and a deeper
understanding of these ideas, their distinctions, and the history behind them can

lead to new realizations about the way online resources work. The connection

between the World Wide Web and internet is relatively straightforward. As the

Mozilla Foundation notes in its documentation for developers, the web is one of

the applications built on the internet. Browsing the web through search engines or

by typing in addresses is far from the only way to make use of the internet, but it is

one of the most familiar. Breaking down each term can illuminate this relationship

further. According to Owo Abidemi E. (2002), “there has been lot of improvement

on the web programming concepts. We had the top down and bottom up the

procedural and structured, the object oriented and event driven programming

methods of software application and information generation to meet users

requirements:. A major initial motivation for both the early networks. ARPANET

and internet was resource sharing, connecting the two together was far more

economical than duplicating these very expensive computers. However, while file

database transfer and remote login (Telnet) were very important applications,

electronic mail has probably had the most significant impact of the innovations

from that era. Email provided a new model of how people could communicate

with each other and changed the nature of collaboration. A key concept of the

internet is that it was not designed for just one application, but as a general

infrastructure on which new application could be conceived, as illustrated later by

the emergence of the World Wide Web. It is web evolution will bring us new

applications. Internet telephone and slightly further out, internet television. It is

changing to accommodate yet another generation of underlying network

technologies with different characteristics and requirements, from broadband

residential access to satellites. The intent of these applications is generally to

promote a product or service or actually sell a product or service over the network,
 be it local or global (Bob-B1,M 1996). Thus, attracting and keeping a target

audience in an important aspect of web programming.

2.4 Data and Information

Ugorji (2006), Dimoji (2005) and Okafor (2009) are at the view that data and

information are terms people use interchangeably in everyday speech, but they

mean different thing. Data are facts such as a Name, a Number etc. while the term

information is simply a processed data, that is when data is converted into a more

useful or intelligent form.

A data item e.g. (the data 28/06/2011) means title, when you associate the data

item such as deadline and a subject, you can create information. Example, the

deadline for your next project might be 28/06/2011. You store data in a database;

you retrieve information from the database. One cornerstone of data design and

data normalization is that data organization for storage differs from the

information most people want to see. Example: a manager of a sporting goods

supply company might want to see for one scale who the customer was, the

destination of the order, the billing address, the contact phone number, the

placement time of the order, the order’s shipping destination when and how

delivery occurred, what article the order included and which of the company’s

database differs from the particular information the manager wants.

2.5 Role-based Access Control (RBAC) Concept

The concept of roles has been used in software applications for more than 3

decades, they were first introduced in operating system groups and database

management system privilege grouping. The National Institute of Standards and

 Technology (NIST) proposed a US national standard for role-based access control

(RBAC) through the International Committee for Information Technology

Standards (ANSI/INCITS) in 2004 by combining the Ferraiolo-Kuhn model

(1992) and the framework proposed by Sandhu et al. (1996). Roles serve as

organizational agents, carrying out specific job duties for the organization.

Through the roles that are given to users, RBAC regulates all access to system

resources. RBAC protects users from accessing information that is not pertinent to

them or required to perform their responsibilities by granting them access

permissions only to the information they require to carry out the activities that

have been given to them based on their job roles. The rights a user is given are

determined by their function, which also ensures that some user groups cannot

access sensitive data or carry out operations that act as entry points for private

information. In RBAC, roles are dependent on a variety various factors, including

job specialty, responsibility, and authorization. Numerous organizations assign

responsibilities to different types of users, such as end users, administrators, and

specialist users. For particular tasks, a role's ability to read, create, or change files

may also be regulated. Access will need to be adjusted if a key member changes

roles within the Association. The individual user will have access to all the rights

granted to the role group when they are added to it. Access will be limited if they

are excluded from the group for any reason. RBAC allow users to be given

temporary access to particular data or applications that they may require to finish a

particular task.

2.5.1 Components of Role-based Access Control

Role-based access control is based on components that control how users engage

with the processes they are attempting to access.

Users: The individual seeking access is the user. Access requests may or may not

be made immediately by the user; for instance, one may be made as soon as a user

logs in. Additionally, users aren't always real people.

Roles: The privileges and permissions that can be granted to a user are determined

by their roles. Roles often occur in hierarchies, where a higher role in the hierarchy

is associated with more privileges than a lower role..

Operations: Users have the option to request access to actions and objects. Any

process or action that takes place in a computing environment is referred to as an

operation. For instance, two of the most frequent actions we take in a typical

computing environment are changing system parameters and terminating running

processes, while Objects: Users can also request access to an object, a static file, a

data set, a website, or any other asset, as was previously indicated. Operations and

objects differ significantly from one another in that accessing an object does not

alter the state of the system, whereas performing an operation does.

Permissions: Role-based access control depends on permissions to function,

without which it would be impossible. A role can only access certain activities and

objects according to a set of business rules. Permissions, for instance, refer to the

set of operations that a user with employee ID A12 can carry out when assuming

the role of a contributor.

Sessions: Sessions determine the length of time that a role will interact with

processes and objects. Right at the start of a session, RBAC is prompted, and it is

active until the session is over. The session starts as soon as a user launches a

browser on the corporate network and attempts to view an intranet page. Until the

user closes the browser, the RBAC system will verify the user's role, give access

based on permissions, keep track of the operations and objects accessed, and

maintain a log. A session refers to the whole exchange of information.

2.5.2 Benefits of Role-based Access Control

Minimize the risk of data breaches: Implementing RBAC can be very important

in limiting the damage caused by an attacker who has stolen a user's credentials

because it not only lowers the danger of cyber-attacks and abuse by malicious

insiders.

Demonstrate and enforce compliance: RBAC aids firms in conforming to

regulatory and legislative obligations as laws continue to expand at all levels of

government, from the Federal level to state and industry-specific demands. There

is a lot of demand on financial institutions and healthcare organizations to

demonstrate how they handle, manage, and safeguard sensitive data.

Improve operational productivity and efficiency: When training and recruit

new users, changing the roles of existing employees, or requesting password

changes, RBAC enables enterprises to reduce paperwork and change requests.

You can swiftly add and alter roles and apply them across platforms, operating

systems (OS), and apps by automating the process with RBAC. When user rights

are given, the possibility of human error is also minimized.

2.6 Relational Database

According to Engr. P. D Joseph (2006) there was a time in the primitive and

barbarian days before computer, the amount of information shepherded by a group

of people could be collected in the wisdom and the stories of its older members. It

gets to a stage when the data are too much to be managed in the minds of the

elders and so in order to store all the new information, humanity invented the

technology of writing and then great scholars like Aristotle warned that the
invention of the alphabet would lead to the subtle but total demise of the creativity

and sensibility of humanity, data began to be stored in voluminous data

repositories called books. As we know, eventually books capsulated with great

speed and soon whole communities of books migrated to the first real “database”

libraries. Database, since its conception in the 60’s were created to solve the

problems with file oriented system in that they were compact, fast easy to use,

current and accurate, allows the easy sharing of data between multiple users and

well secured. Date (1990), In the mid 70’s, Computer database as we know them

today were in their infancy around 1970 a research called “ted codd” had

developed the “relational data model” which has become the foundation stone of

modern database technology. This database is based on the relational data model,

which stores data in the form of rows(tuple) and columns(attributes), and together

forms a table(relation). A relational database uses SQL for storing, manipulating,

as well as maintaining the data. E.F. Codd invented the database in 1970. Each

table in the database carries a key that makes the data unique from

others. Examples of Relational databases are MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server,

Oracle, etc. Veen (2001) “The Art and Science of Web Design”, says that

webpages are generated dynamically by queuing the list of available products in

the inventory against some search parameters. The dynamically generated page

will display the information about each item such as title, author, ISBN, price that

is stored in the database. In the mid-70 however, computer database particularly

in the hands of end users were not a common thing.

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