Case study for Information Systems and Databases - SLU

Case study for Information Systems and Databases

South London University’s Computing school wishes to set up a database to manage its external speaker and placements processes. This is all part of developing links with local businesses and giving students the opportunity to get some industry experience.

At present, individual members of the teaching team organise guest lectures, but this is all done in a rather random fashion.  They might use their personal contacts or meet an interesting speaker at an external event and invite him/her to give a lecture or run a workshop for their students. If the speaker agrees, then the lecturer will contact the timetabling unit to arrange a suitable date, time and room for the lecture and then announce details of the event through the Blackboard announcement system.  
With the increasing emphasis on giving students ‘real world’ experiences, more and more of these events are being run and the school wishes to make the most of the contacts they have and which topics these contacts have expressed an interest in talking about. Unfortunately, these contacts and speakers are not stored centrally, which leads to problems, for example:

• There have been occasions where multiple guest lectures have been arranged in one week for a particular cohort of students, as each of the teaching staff concerned had no idea of the other lecturers’ arrangements.  
• A number of guest lectures were arranged on the same topic, thereby duplicating the content of a previous lecture.
• Staff have independently invited speakers from the same company.
• Staff members have contacted an organisation to ask if it would consider offering placement/workshop/ guest lecture etc, to find that the contact has already been approached and has turned down the request - so is annoyed that he/she is being targeted again.
• Staff members wanted to re-run specific guest lectures in a subsequent year for a new cohort of students, but the staff member who had arranged the original lecture had left the university without leaving details of the contact. 
• Students have turned up to the staff room wanting to know where a lecture was being held. etc.. etc..

The school is very keen to set up a database as it feels that if everything is centrally stored it will be able eradicate such problems and to use the contacts to greater advantage, for example to see if a speaker (or someone within their organisation) would be interested in providing placements/job experience or live projects for students, as well as guest lectures.  The Head of School hopes that a sensible timetable can be put together showing the guest lectures for the whole of a semester which students and teaching staff could access. 

The Head of Computing has suggested that, with a new system, teaching staff could put in requests for a guest lecture on a particular topic, and the system administrator might then be able to suggest a suitable external speaker for that topic from information held in the database.

The Head of School would also like to store a designated staff member for each organisation, responsible for nurturing and developing links with the organisation. Anyone wishing to contact a  company would need to liaise with the designated staff contact person. Members of staff should have easy access to this information. The system should also be able to store a history of the contacts made with each company and the reason for that contact, which teaching staff could refer to.

The Head of School and administrator think that useful reports could be generated from the proposed database, for example to show how the school is interacting with businesses and the local community, which lecturer has made the most effort at developing links with industry (and who hasn’t bothered at all…), and many other outputs.

All in all, the current system is a mess and you have been called in to sort it out. The above description is just a basic outline of some of the issues and problems. You can make any sensible assumptions to fill in any gaps.  Good luck!