Computerized Learning And Teaching Management System
[A CASE STUDY OF COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT]

CHAPTER THREE
3.0    SYSTEM ANALYSIS AND DESIGN
3.1    SYSTEM ANALYSIS
According to Wikipedia (the free encyclopedia), System Analysis is the study of sets of interacting entities, including computer systems analysis. This field is closely related to requirements analysis or operations research. It is also "an explicit formal inquiry carried out to help someone identify a better course of action and make a better decision than he might otherwise have made. System Analysis is a methodology that involves the application of systematic approaches to collects facts about an existing system with the aim of improving it or replacing it with more efficient system within the context of the available resources.
3.1.1    ANALYSIS OF EXISTING SYSTEM
Before we analyze the design of the proposed system, we need to carefully highlight the problems of the existing system so as to avoid recurrence. This analysis serves as a pointer on how to embark on building the proposed system that will help the students of University of Abuja to view their courses, download materials, view weekly time table and also get a detailed course description and outline. The problems of the current system should be outlined. Below are some likely problems associated with the existing system;
i.    Cost of acquiring materials(photocopying of materials)
ii.    Manual method of view courses, timetable and descriptions
iii.    Students do not have comprehensive or detailed material on courses offered
iv.    Too much workload on employees
v.    Loitering of the departments’ wall with courses information
3.1.2    REQUIREMENTS DEFINITION
Preliminary investigation plays an important role in developing a satisfactory requirement. Its’ as a result of thorough investigation of how the current or the existing system works using the facts gathered at the preliminary investigation that leads to focusing on the possibility of replacing the existing system or improving upon the existing system. This task involves:
Method of Information Gathering
Data used for designing of the system were gathered through several means. Such data includes the departmental courses which were gathered from the souvenirs given to students and also collected from each department, the available course description and outline used were collected from the secretary of each department. Materials were also collected as softcopy from some of the students while some were downloaded from the Internet and also the time table was structured based on the course which they offered.
3.2    SYSTEM DESIGN
System design is the process of defining the architecture, components, modules, interfaces, and data for a system to satisfy specified requirements through system modeling. One could see it as the application of systems theory to product development. The design of this system will be a user friendly for all students considering the fact that not all students of the University are computer oriented. It shall be design in such a way that students will be able to navigate easily through the information supplied on the system. The design of this system shall also require a full access to Internet. The system design being a web based design; a platform required such as client interface and server interface. The client interface is developed using Hypertext Pre- processor, Adobe Dreamweaver CS4, Adobe Photoshop and the local host is wampServer that also serves as the server side.
Its flexibility and is widely used for general purpose scripting language that is especially well suited for web development and can also be embedded into Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 was used because it is very powerful and widely spread application preferred for web design. Adobe Photoshop CS4 was also used to design the images on the web site because of the way it create and handle images in more flexible way.
3.2.1    ARCHITECTURE OF WEB APPLICATIONS
At the most basic level, the Web works off client/server architecture. Simply stated, that means that both a central server and a client application are responsible for some amount of processing. This setup differs from that of a program such as Microsoft Word, which operates just fine without any help from a server. Those of you who used older VAX machines might remember the days of dumb terminals, which had no processing power whatsoever. Depending on where you work today, perhaps in a university or a bank, you might still use applications that are in no way dependent on the client. In other words, applications in which all the work is done on the central computer.