aris.uniport.edu.ng

Why ARIS?

Introduction

Teaching and research remain the primary activities in higher institutions; but, there are other day-to-day activities that requires to be managed efficiently and effectively, and they include:

processing of prospective candidates applications for different academic programs.
collating and vetting successful candidates admission credentials.
payment of various fees by students.
course registration by students.
computation of grades, grade points, and CGPA of students.
generation of relevant academic documents like Transcripts, Semester Results, Statement of Results, etc.
generation of different management decision-making information like student population, best-performing students, students with CGPA less than or greater than or equal to a given value, etc.

All the above-mentioned activities, and more could be an uphill task if there is no effective means of managing and extracting the required information.

Unfortunately, many institutions stiil adopt the manual method of managing students' records, which is time-consuming, and often prone to a variety of errors. The solution to these challenges lies in an efficient information management system.

ARIS is a web-based solution that addresses the needs of Nigerian higher institutions seeking an integrated student records information management system. ARIS provides a comprehensive and flexible end-to-end solution. Apart from handling the business needs of a higher institution, ARIS is robust and reliable and offers a variety of benefits.

Why ARIS - You Decide?

Many scenarios have been imagined and many scenes witnessed. Lots of frustrations have been seen in schools as management struggle to collect, collate, interpret, and administer students’ records error-free.

Files have been seen to disappear just when they are needed most, and reappear without the relevant information. Results have been seen to be ‘doctored’ to suit personal, corporate, political, and sundry needs.

Furthermore, scenarios where documents are burnt in arson and accidents have been imagined, and institutions are left to guess-fill their registries afresh. Situations where students’ records are ‘eaten-up’ by insects, rodents, and moles have been seen.

In other instances, scenes where arguments are raised to high havens about paid and unpaid fees as well as earned and unearned grades by anxious students and flustered school management has been seen; also political rhetoric of who attended what institutions, when and what grades (if any) by such persons have been heard. It is on these premises that we wonder if solutions existed for all these problems.

Also, we have witnessed institutions complain about an inefficient and unfriendly automated system they use and wished for a more efficient and user-friendly one. Also, scenarios where institutions practically manages their students records management operations manually, even when there is supposed to be an automated system, has been seen.

In all these, we wonder if there could be a solution.

We have imagined a situation where a student wishes to know just how he/she is doing academically, and after a click of a computer mouse, all possible academic information about him/he is generated. We have imagined a situation where due to arson or plain accident a backup of students’ academic records is reproduced and the institution suffers absolutely no lag phase and information is fully secure. We have imagined that the institution wishes to know the students’ academic performance, population distribution, etc. and just by the click of a computer mouse, these information are generated.

We have also imagined the institution wishing to know the academic profile of students (either for the purpose of possible advice to withdraw or recognition) and a report is generated to show the students that meets the specified criteria, as well as details of their performance.

Furthermore, we have imagined a ‘ghost’ student appearing in a school, years after his supposed graduation, to lay claims on the school for Statement of Results, Testimonials, Certificates, etc. and the computer generates a photograph that shows how much of an impostor this character truly is. Also, in a situation where the student is a legitimate student, the required document (Testimonial, Statement of Result, etc.,) is immediately generated for the purpose which the student desires it.

We have received reports of mental stress with consequential momentous errors and seen anguish printed over faces of academic staff struggling to compute grades and GPA of students. We have imagined a computerized format where the raw scores are fed into the computer, and the rest of the computation and grading are automatically done by the computer.

Furthermore, we have heard stories of institutions acquiring software solutions that did not meet their needs and/or software solutions that did not work, and consequently lost confidence in the ability of software providers.

We have imagined a lot of things in consonance with what we have seen, felt, dreamt about, and have resolved to unknot those thorny issues bothering the education administrators and improve the performance of school’s academic records department.

Hence, ARIS aims to solve the problems inherent in students' records management by

eliminating inefficient and out-dated manual database system by providing means to effectively maintain accurate, up-to-date student database that can be quickly and easily accessed.
eliminating delay in processing and computation of results by providing an efficient means to collect, collate, interpret, and administer students’ results error-free.
eliminating delay in processing and generation of relevant academic documents by providing an automated means to promptly process and release relevant academic documents (like transcripts, statement of results, etc.) in real-time fashion.
eliminating poor and ineffective academic results management process (usually associated with low work throughput and prone to security breaches) by providing effective means to secure and protect students’ data against pilfering and unforeseen disaster.
providing automated administrative and decision-making tools to analyse students’ performance and an automated means for institution management to extract decision-making information about students’ academic performance. Such information may include students’ academic performance, students’ with CGPA less than or greater than or equal to a specified CGPA value, students’ population distribution analysis, etc.
eliminating poor communication interface between returning and fresh students and institution by providing a seamless communication interface between students and the institution. This would eliminate the frequent traffic of students to offices.
eliminating poor control of school fees payment by a seamless interface with an approved online payment gateway for the purpose of fees payments, as well as providing means to check if a student has fully paid school fees before allowing the student to register for a given academic year.
eliminating poor online graduation clearance by providing a common online interface for various clearance officers to clear graduating students before their various academic documents can be printed.

Benefits

ARIS provides you with a variety of benefits that will improve your efficiency and effectiveness. Some of the benefits include:

Common platform

The system provides a common platform to manage students’ records of different categories of students.

Secured

Data is secured as only authorised users have access to update/modify specific data. For instance, academic course results can only be updated or modified by the lecturer the academic course is assigned to for a given academic session. Also, a student can only view academic information about him/herself. Furthermore, once the system administrator has locked the data of any given academic session such data can no more be modified. Furthermore, transactions are secured with SSL certificates. Typically, SSL is used to secure credit card transactions, data transfer and logins.

Flexibility

Information search is be based on a flexible search engine that enables users (especially management staff) to query the database in an interactive manner to enable them reach the desired decision and extract the required information.

Scalability

The system is scalable, thus accommodating the possibility of growth. The system allows resources to be added and used without any system redesign.

Intelligence

The system is capable of supporting both ‘structured’ and ‘unstructured’ tasks that require managerial judgment. This improves effectiveness.

Multi-user

The system can be accessed from many different computers while accessing the same operational data, that is, it can be used by multi-users simultaneously in real-time.

Real-time

Users have access to up-to-the-minute information.

Seamless Automation

The system can automatically generate some identified vital academic documents (Transcripts, Statement of Results, Semester Results, etc.) in a seamless manner.

Simplicity

The system provides an automated means for the relevant school authorities to approve academic results.

Application Module	This module handles all applications for different academic programs from the point of application, through payment and finally shortlisting.
Admission Module	This module completely automates the admission process from acceptance through various clearances to generation of Matriculation Number.
Fees Module	This module handles online payments of varying fees.
Academic Module	This is the core of the system. It handles the various academic programs configuration, as well as result processing to automatically track each students’ academic progress.
Students Module	Each student is furnished with login details that allow him/her log in to register recommended courses, pay fees, check results and academic performance.
Parents Module	This module allows Parents/Guardians monitor the progress of their wards
Hostel Accommodation	It handles hostel accommodation management operations
Reporting Module	The module provides means to generate different reports