Project Inception: A Centralized Announcement Platform for Universities

Case Study: Siantou University Institute

App Name: Siantou App

Siantou App aims to provide a centralized announcement platform that enhances communication within a University, in this case Siantou University Institute. Siantou is located in Yaounde - Cameroon, and it is the University I attend.

Problem Statement

Whatsapp is the main platform used for communication/announcements in Siantou, and these are some limitations I find with using Whatsapp for this purpose:

• WhatsApp forums have a limit to the amount of members that can be in a group. Depending on how large a department or batch is, it might not be able to contain everyone.

• There are usually a lot of messages in class groups, which can make it tedious to go through for someone who doesn't want to miss important announcements.

• Information shared in class forums does not come directly from the school authorities and can be misinterpreted by those delivering it. Sometimes, wrong information is shared.

• New students often miss important notifications because they might not be aware of the existence of a class group, and even when they join, they cannot view previous announcements.

Solution

My proposed solution is a mobile application that will serve as a centralized platform for all announcements. University administrators, HODs (Heads of Department), and other staff can make announcements on this platform directly and students can trust the integrity of the information as it is from the school authorities themselves. Students can view all past announcements regardless of when they joined, and the information will always be relevant because only authorized staff will be allowed to post on this platform.

System Description

This platform consists of 3 types of users, Students, Staff, and Administrators. Administrators are staff members with super privileges. We also have two other entities; Channel and Announcement. A channel is an information outlet for a specific domain, topic, or department that users can subscribe to get updates for that channel, an announcement is a piece of information shared in a channel by an authorized staff member.

Below is a use case diagram for this system.

From the diagram above, the first user we have is the Student. The student can login, subscribe to channels and view announcements. A staff member can perform all the actions a student is capable of performing, in addition to that, they can post announcements in channels they are authorized to. The Admin is a user with the highest privileges in the system, they manage other staff accounts(creating, deleting, modifying permissions etc), manage channels and can perform all the actions the other users can perform.

System Architecture

This system will have an Admin dashboard where administrators can manage staff accounts and channels. A mobile application that will be used to post announcements, view announcements, subscribe to channels etc. All these clients interact with one API to perform actions and modify data.

ER Diagram

This is an Entity Relationship Diagram for the system, showing the various tables and how they are related.