VIVA Scheduler and Notifier
VIVA Scheduler and Notifier
VIVA Scheduling of final year project students is a hectic taskfor Final Year Project supervisors. During each semester, the project supervisormust supervise many students and to manually manage the VIVA scheduling task forevery student is very repetitive and tiresome task due to challenges faced by thesupervisor. One of the challenges is that there are hundreds of study centers acrossthe country which include both VU Owned as well as Private Campuses. As per rule,the student is not allowed to appear for VIVA from private campus. In such situation,the student is asked to appear for VIVA at nearest VU Owned Campus. Currently, thisprocess of finding the nearby VIVA station is being manually performed by the supervisorsby calculating the distance from student s study center to the nearby VU owned campusfrom the Google Map and then the nearest campus is assigned to the student to appearfor VIVA. This takes a lot of time. Secondly, each student must be sent an emailto notify him/her about the VIVA date and time. This is also done manually, andwhich is prone to many unwanted issues such as conflicts in VIVA schedule of students.We aim to overcome these challenges by developing a system which will automate theVIVA scheduling and VIVA notification tasks. Users of the Proposed System
Project Supervisors
Functional Requirements:
1. The supervisor will enter the Group ID, Student ID as wellas the student s current study center by looking at his/her profile. Then, the systemwill provide the supervisor a functionality to search the nearest VIVA station (VUowned campus) based on the VU center which will be given by the supervisor.
2. The nearby VIVA station will be selected from the databasewhich will contain the nearest campus for each private campus. The system will providethe supervisor an admin interface from which the supervisor will be able to maintainthe data for each study center (private campus) and the neighboring VIVA station,their addresses along with their distances from the respective study center.
3. By using the admin interface, the supervisor will be ableto add/update or delete the information about any campus.
4. If the study center selected by the supervisor is alreadya VU Owned campus, then in that case, the same study center will be selected asthe VIVA station for that student. However, if the student is an overseas student,then the VIVA station should be selected as Home. For overseas students, OPKST codeis used as study center.
5. After searching the nearest VIVA station, the supervisor willselect the date and time from a calendar to schedule the VIVA.
6. One of the key features of our proposed system is a VIVA notifierthrough Email.
7. Based on the information available, the system will generatethe contents of an email for the student by using the template shown in Figure 1.The contents of the email will be customizable and will be specific to each studentcontaining his/her name, viva station and the date/time. The template of the emailcan be like the one given below. The system will use this template from a file andwill automatically replace the values given in blue font with the information providedto the system.
Figure 1: VIVA Scheduling Email Template
8. After replacing the required fields in the email template,the system should be able to show a preview of the generated email so that the supervisorcan proofread it before sending the email.
9. The system will allow the supervisor to send an email at thestudent s email address to notify him/her about her VIVA. The system will also senda copy of the generated email at the email address of the VIVA station selectedby the system.
However, in case if the student is an overseas student then only,he/she will receive the email as there is no VIVA station in this situation.
10. The system must ensure that the VIVA of no student is scheduledtwice by mistake. Moreover, the student must be able to detect the VIVA date/timeconflicts for more than one student. To ensure this, the system will maintain thehistory of already scheduled VIVAs in a database. This history will be checked eachtime before scheduling the VIVA of a new student.
11. It is possible that that VIVA of a student is required tobe rescheduled because of his absence due to any reason. In such case, the supervisorgives one last chance to the student to appear for VIVA. In such case, it is importantthat the system maintains the VIVA scheduling history of that student and uses anemail template
12. The system must also support the functionality for batchemail scheduling and email sending. To use this feature, the supervisor will uploada file to the system containing the student ID and study center in each row. Theproposed system will read the student ID and his/her study center of each studentfrom that file one by one to find out the nearest VIVA station.
13. The supervisor will then select the start date/time and durationfor each VIVA.
14. The system will automatically calculate the date/time foreach student by using the start date/time as well as VIVA duration.
15. The supervisor can also select how many VIVAs he intendsto conduct in each day. The number of VIVAs to be conducted may be more than thenumber of VIVA, the supervisor intends to conduct in a day. So, the system willschedule the VIVAs accordingly so that it stretches across more than one workingdays.
16. After scheduling the VIVA date/time for each student, thesystem will send an email to each student as well as his designated VIVA stationone by one.
17. As proposed before, we will maintain the recordof scheduled VIVAs in the database for VIVA for future use.
