EduConnect

Abstract

"The Non-Formal Educational (NFE) Units in Zonal Education Department (ZED) address the educational needs of disadvantaged and marginalized groups who may have dropouts from the schools or who may require additional support for continuing the formal education. Such as street children and long absentees. N.F.E units also serve as a bridge between the resourceful entities such as vocational training centers, job placement services and other organizations to support the career development of the affected individuals. Within the realm of Education Management, these units suffer from a lack of a Comprehensive management system to facilitate the needs of the officers and to automate and enhance their work quality and efficiency. All the decision-making processes are undertaken by the manual workforce leading to errors and delays in handling cases. Record keeping and analyzation is primarily paper based, so it requires a significant amount of time to track the progress and manage the tasks assigned for them. EduConnect is an application develop to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the non-formal education unit at zonal education departments in Sri Lanka. The application will automate the manual process of the project officers who work in the field and facilitate decision-making, reporting, and analyzing tasks. Additionally, this application has a centralized information system where the stakeholders can share the information, monitor the progress of the individuals, and facilitate training programs to the relevant individuals. Furthermore, this solution provides features to easily extract the information whenever needed and field offices tedious workload will be significantly reduced due to these features. Agile Development methodology was used throughout the Software Development Life Cycle undertaking an iterative and incremental approach. Initial stage was focused more on system designing and diagraming to get a solid understanding about the boundaries and requirements. After finalizing the requirements, the features were priorities, focusing on developing the more important and frequent functionalities and testing them in an incremental manner."