Internship supervision and evaluation system (ISES)

70 INTERNSHIP SUPERVISION AND EVALUATION SYSTEM (ISES) Lakshana Assalaarachchi1, Ganguli Ranasinghe2, Thilini Rambukwella3, Champa Hewagamage4, Kaveesha Silva 5 Department of Information Technology, Faculty of Management Studies and Commerce, University of Sri Jayewardenepura 1lakshan[email protected]m, 2ganguranasinghe9[email protected], 3thilini97ta[email protected],4champa[email protected], 5kaveesha[email protected] Background Organization and Business Domain Department of Information Technology of the Faculty of Management Studies and Commerce offers the course: Internship in Information Systems (ITC4344) to its final year students. Students need to complete a minimum period of 420 working hours doing an internship in an organization related to the Information Systems domain during the course period. Course coordinators (Internship Coordinators) assigned for the course oversee the internship supervision and evaluation process, which happens manually. Overview of the Existing System How the existing system functions: Students' performance during the internship is supervised and evaluated by the immediate supervisors of their internship organizations (External Supervisors) and the lecturers from the department (Internal Supervisors). Students must maintain a Practical Training Record Book to record their job experiences. Further, they must frequently coordinate with the Internal Supervisors assigned by the Internship Coordinator during the semester to discuss the progress of their internship. Progress report submission is required during the first week, mid-semester, and semester end. Problems with Existing System: The above process was identified as tedious due to the large number of documents to be submitted physically to the department, which requires more time and effort. Additionally, the lack of a common platform to 71 coordinate all the parties involved in the process was identified as an issue. Thus, the team suggested automating the existing system by introducing a web-based application as a replacement. System Analysis Problem Analysis With the physical submission of Internship documents, students face challenges such as the risk of misplacing the documents and the excessive time and effort required to visit the university. Additionally, Internship Coordinators face an issue coordinating External and Internal Supervisors whenever required. Requirement Analysis Following functional requirements were identified based on the main actors of the system through fact-finding techniques such as interviewing and investigating existing documents (Department of Information Technology, 2021): • The Intern should be able to: • Register to the system by submitting an Internship Contract • Request External Supervisor to register • Update Training Records • Download templates and submit completed progress reports • The Internship Coordinator should be able to: • Assign Internal Supervisors to Interns • View Progress/ Evaluation Reports • Send email notifications • The Internal Supervisor should be able to: • Create an account • View training records and information of assigned Interns • The External Supervisor should be able to: • Create an account • Approve training records of the Intern • Download the template and submit the completed External Supervisor’s Evaluation 72 • View Intern details Proposed System and Objectives We proposed Internship Supervision and Evaluation System (ISES), a webbased application, as a solution for the existing issues. The following objectives are expected to be achieved through the proposed system: 1. To create a platform to coordinate all the parties involved 2. To facilitate regular monitoring of Interns’ performance 3. To maintain internship documents systematically It includes three main modules: user management, documentation and record maintenance, and monitoring and evaluation to achieve the above objectives. Users can access these modules based on their needs via any web browser. Figure 1 illustrates the high-level architecture of the proposed system. Figure 1: High-level System Architecture of ISES 73 System Development Development Methodology used: The Waterfall Method was used as the development methodology where the team followed the phases of the System Development Life Cycle. Technologies used: Laravel was the web development framework, and MySQL was used as the database management system through the WAMP server. PHP, HTML5, Tailwind CSS and JavaScript languages were used for the development. Visual Studio Code was used as the source code editor. Conclusion The main objectives of the system were achieved by automating the internship documents maintenance process and creating a common platform for all involved parties to carry out their tasks. However, there were exceptional scenarios which were not addressed in the developed system, such as handling changes to the Internship Contract and situations where an external supervisor oversees several interns. These limitations will be addressed in future releases. Additionally, enhancing the report submission through online forms and providing a single sign-on facility are suggested as future upgrades. References Department of Information Technology (2021) Internship Record BookITC 4344:Internship in Information Systems-B.Sc. in Business Information Systems ( Special ) Degree Programme. 2nd edn. Edited by L. Gunawardena and T. Chandrasiri.