Enhancing Student Services using Messaging ...

INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, NIRMA UNIVERSITY, AHMEDABAD – 382 481, 25-27 NOVEMBER, 2009

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Enhancing Student Services using Messaging System for Educational Institute Vipul K. Dabhi, Harshad B. Prajapati, Nishant D. Solanki, and Hirav J. Shah

Abstract-- When the examination results are declared, there is a huge chaos at the college out of the eagerness of the students to know their results. In educational institutes, generally results are declared on web sites or on notice boards of the institutes. However, for students living in villages, fast and smooth internet connectivity is not easily available. Now a day mobile penetration is more than internet so it is easy to communicate with people using mobile phones. We have developed a messaging system that provides an efficient way to declare results and other information like attendance of the student or cancellation of lecture by using SMS. It provides facility to unicast, multicast and broadcast the messages. To develop the system we have used Java, MS-Access and SMSLib. SMSLib is an open source and freeware library that provides API for reading content of phone-book, receiving sms and sending sms. The developed system can be useful to educational institutes to improve student services in a cost effective manner. Index Terms-- SMS (Short Messaging Service), Messaging System, Student Services I.

INTRODUCTION

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n educational institutes, generally results are declared on web si1te or on notice board of the college. For students living in villages, it is inconvenient to know their results as they have to access internet to know the result. Fast and smooth internet connectivity is not easily achievable in villages. Although nearly all of the students carry a sophisticated communication device which they use constantly in all walks of life, isn’t it strange the institutions do not use them to communicate? Now a day every one keeps mobile phone, so SMS is best and convenient way of communication. We have developed the system that is very useful to inform the students and parents about the result, presence and other information like cancellation of lecture or declaration of holiday. Advantages of our system are: 1) It is most economical way to keep in touch with parents. 2) Any one can know result/attendance of student by sending simple request. 3) Using the system, we can also send general message to any

1 Vipul K. Dabhi is with the Dharmsinh Desai University, Nadiad 387001, GUJARAT, INDIA (phone: 91-268-2520502; fax: 91-268-2520501; e-mail: [email protected]). Harshad B. Prajapati is with the Dharmsinh Desai University, Nadiad 387001, GUJARAT, INDIA (e-mail: harshad.b.prajapati@ gmail.com). Nishant Solanki and Hirav Shah are students of UG course in Information Technology Department at Dharmsinh Desai University during 2006 to 2010.

one. 4) It uses open source and freeware messaging library, so any one can enhance the functionality of the system. Our objective is to develop messaging system using open source messaging library to provide cost effective solution to educational institutes. Our system can be enhanced to accommodate situations such as if a lecture, or similar activity is to be cancelled. Students must be informed of this; otherwise the institution’s administration may be criticized. In this type of situations the system is most efficient way to inform students. Here we briefly guide the reader about related work in the field. Emphasis on SMS as a more appropriate medium for providing e-government services in developing countries and proposal of an SMS-based e-government model can be found in [7]. Use of bulk SMS in schools and universities to further develop classroom interactions and set up a virtual community as a public relations system is discussed in [8]. Lecturers can conduct mobile quizzes in many question forms with their students via SMS. The objective of the work in [9] is to develop their own education services based on SMS to support their student’s need of information. The paper is structured as follow. The section II discusses motivation of work. The section III discusses architecture and comparison of SMSLib with other similar components. The section IV discusses functionalities provided by the system and message format of sms request and reply. Finally, the section V concludes our work. II. MOTIVATION OF WORK Now a day in India mobile penetration is more than internet. In villages it is not easy to access internet but everyone has a mobile phones, so it is easy to communicate with people using mobile phones. For people living in villages this system provides convenient way to keep them up-to-date as to what their child is doing in college. Also it can be used to inform the students about declaration of holiday or cancellation of lectures. The developed system can be useful to educational institutes to improve student services. III. ARCHITECTURE AND COMPONENTS OF THE SYSTEM There are four components of the messaging system : (i) User interface (ii) SMS library for sending and receiving of

NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CURRENT TRENDS IN TECHNOLOGY, ‘NUCONE – 2009’

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messages via mobile phone. (iii) Component/module to interact with SMS library (iv) Database to store/retrieve the students’ results, attendances and other information. There are many libraries available that allows you to send/receive SMS messages via a compatible GSM modem or GSM phone. We have considered features of SMSLib [3], GSMLib [4], Ozeki NG SMS Server [5], and Gnokii [6]. The comparison of these libraries is given in Table 1. Based on selected criteria, we found SMSLib as the promising messaging library. We have used Net Beans [1] and Java [2] to develop user interface and module to interact with SMSLib [3]. We have

used ms-access as the database to store/retrieve the student results, student attendances and other information. SMSLib [3] is an open source and free library for Java and Microsoft .NET. With SMSLib, you can easily write a Java or .NET program to send and receive SMS messages from a computer via a GSM mobile phone or GSM modem without learning AT commands. By writing SMS software in Java, we can take advantage of Java's code portability feature. SMSLib supports concatenated SMS messages and flash SMS messages, but it does not support ring tones and logos. SMSLib supports mobile phones that can work in AT mode.

Table 1 Comparison of SMSLib with other similar Components Feature SMSLib Ozeki NG SMS Server Open Source Yes No Database Support Not Required Required XML File as an Yes No input to send SMS SMS High Limited Functionalities Supported Freeware Yes No

Gsmlib Yes Not Required No

Gnokii Yes Not Required No

Limited

High

Yes

Yes

Figure 1 Architecture of the Messaging System

IV. IMPLEMENTATION

system which allows sending a message to multiple recipients. The same message can be sent to thousands of mobile numbers simultaneously.

A. Sending SMS (Result / Attendance): It provides functionally of sending SMS using mobile phone. It will take phone number and message as input and send it according to phone number. 1) Unicast: SMS can be sent to a particular student. 2) Multicast: SMS can be sent to a group of students. 3) Broadcast: The proposed technology for delivering this level is SMS broadcasting, a point-to-point SMS

B. General SMS We can also send general SMS to particular student. C. Reply for a request We can send a reply for received message that is send by any person as a request. It provides functionality of

INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, NIRMA UNIVERSITY, AHMEDABAD – 382 481, 25-27 NOVEMBER, 2009

reading SMS from mobile phone. It also checks format of received SMS, if the format is valid then it will reply for request otherwise it will read next SMS. We have designed the message format for sending the request and generating reply. Below we will discuss about the message sent by student/parent and reply generated by the system.

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For Request: or For Reply: Name : Result or Attendance: Fig. 2 shows the sequence diagram for sending response message for the request received by messaging system. Fig. 3 shows the front-end developed for messaging system.

Figure 2 Sequence Diagram for Sending Response of a Request

Figure 3 GUI of Messaging System

NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CURRENT TRENDS IN TECHNOLOGY, ‘NUCONE – 2009’

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Figure 4 Request Send by Student for getting Result

implementation of the messaging system and also discussed the result. By using our system we can keep parents informed by sending progress report and attendance of student. It provides cost effective solution to educational institutes in enhancing the student services. Students are always over conscious about their training and job. So this system can be enhanced to send training information and job information to students. Our future work will focus on incorporating these functionalities in to the developed system. VI. REFERENCES [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Figure 5 Reply generated by Messaging System for Result Request

[8]

[9]

Figure 6 Request sent by parent for Attendance of his/her Child

Figure 7 Reply generated by Messaging System for Attendance Request Fig. 4 shows the format of the message used by student for getting exam result, whereas Fig. 5 shows the response message generated by messaging system. Fig. 6 shows the format of the message used by parents to know the attendance details of student, whereas Fig. 7 shows the response generated by the messaging system. V. CONCLUSION In this paper, we presented the architecture of the messaging system to enhance student services for an educational institute. We compared the different messaging libraries. We also demonstrated the

NetBeans IDE: http://www.netbeans.org. Sun Microsystems. “Java SDK”, http://java.sun.com/javase/6/. SMSLib, http://www.smslib.org/ GsmLib, http://www.pxh.de/fs/gsmlib/index.html Ozeki NG SMS Gateway, http://www.ozekisms.com/index.php Gnokii, http://www.gnokii.org/ Susanto T.D. and Goodwin R; “Implementing SMS-Based eGovernment Model”, Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Information Integrationand Web-based Applications and Services (iiWAAs2006) Yogyakarta, Indonesia, December 4-6, 2006. Sukaphat S.; “Applying of bulk SMS system to enhance educational communications”, Proceedings of the 13th Asia Pacific Management Conference, Melbourne, Australia, 2007, pp.582-586. Pramsane S. and Sanjayn R.; “Mobile Education services based on SMS”, Third International Conference on eLearning for KnowledgeBased Society, August 3-4, 2006, Bangkok, Thailand.