Application of Technology—Student Registration System
Stephen Tong

Context:
Like other articles in this set about managing teaching and learning in distance education institutions, this article focuses on useful technologies and methods for managing student records. It draws on the example of the Open Learning Institution in Hong Kong.

Source:
Tong, Stephen. 1995. "Application of Technology: Student Registration System." In National Open University, Globalized and Cooperative Distance Learning. Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference of the Asian Association of Open Universities, Taipei, pp. 454-61.

Copyright:
Reproduced with permission.

INTRODUCTION

In the eighties, there were only two universities in Hong Kong, namely the University of Hong Kong and The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Each year there were approximately 23,000 students competing for about 4,000 first-year undergraduate places in these two universities. The demand for higher education was very high. There was no wonder that when the Hong Kong Government established OLI in August 1989 that over 200,000 application forms were distributed. The institute finally received 60,000 applications. After a random allocation process, 4,000 students were enrolled.

In the past 6 years, Hong Kong has seen a rapid expansion of tertiary education. There are now altogether 6 universities in Hong Kong providing 14,000 first-year undergraduate places. The figure is about 18 per cent of Hong Kong's 17-20 age group. This has an indirect effect on our institute's enrollment. The average age of our students has increased from 28 to 32. No. of new applicants is now stabilized at 5000–7000 and the no. of students is around 18,000.

The overwhelming demand in the 1989 enrollment and the concept of open learning gave rise to our random allocation basis mail-in registration system. As the demand has been stabilized in recent years, there is a need to streamline the registration process so as to maximize the allocation of course places and increase the number of registered students. The Walk-in Registration System was therefore developed in 1993 to provide on-line real time registration for students and enable students to maximize their opportunities in registering courses of their own interest.

This paper briefly reviews the two registration systems currently used in OLI and show what technology can offered in course registration for distance learning.

The Operation of Mail-in Registration

OLI recruitment operates twice a year on a 6 months cycle. The cycle rolls out by sending reminder letters to inactive students in April and October each year. Re-registration forms will also be sent to all current students for them to apply courses for the coming semester. Courses will first be allocated to the deferred students. The remaining places will be allocated by different criteria like student's programme of study, credit accumulated, pre-requisite or random to the mail-in applicants. The mixture of allocation process is necessary for some of the high level courses which only have very limited no. of places. It is also essential for some of the professional degree courses which require pre-requisites. Offer letters and debit notes will subsequently be sent to the successful students for payment through bank. Once payments made, the students will be registered in the system and course materials and student identity cards will be sent. Students can also select their preferred tutorial groups over the phone.

The design of the whole mail-in registration is home basis and does not require applicants to come to our campus. This is very important to our applicants as the majority of them are working adults and cannot afford the time to come to our campus to do registration.

Table 1 below summarized the schedule of the mail-in registration for a typical October semester registration.

The Application of Technology in the Mail-in Registration

OLI has been growing rapidly since its establishment In 1989. It started by offering only undergraduate courses. In the current semester, we offer courses ranges from short courses to postgraduate courses. The Mail-in Registration System is now handling more than 39,000 course applications every semester. In order to cope with the large volume of applications and also reduce the impact of changes due to the introduction of new programmes, OLI has been using some of the industry proven technologies in its Mail-in Registration.

The Mail-in Registration System uses ORACLE (a relational database) for its file management. The relational database and ORACLE's 4th generation language tools reduce the pains of modifying the system especially when the institute has to launch a new product in very short time. One of the typical example was the launching of MBA in the current semester. The programme was only officially approved in May this year. As our registration system was originally designed for the undergraduate courses only, it had to be enhanced and ready in July to receive the first batch of MBA applicants.

At the moment, our student database has 60,000 student records and takes up 900MB of disk space.

In each admission, students are required to fill in re-registrations forms to inform the institute the courses they prefer to study. OLI recently replaced the traditional re-registration form with the computer printed OMR form for students to mark their course choices. This arrangement has reduced the error rate of the re-registration form to almost zero and also significantly improved the throughput of the data capture for re-registration. In fact it can process as many as 3,000 re-registration forms per hour.

The allocation of tutorial group was originally on a random basis. This arrangement had several drawbacks. Firstly, the tutorial classes very often clashed with students' activities and resulting in a lot of administrative work for Registry in reallocating tutorial classes. Secondly, the random allocation also prohibited the formation of study pal group for old students.

OLI has recently developed an IVRS tutorial group selection system for students to select tutorial classes. The IVRS is a handy and friendly interface between telephone callers and host computers. This interface allows any telephone in anywhere to become a computer terminal. The telephone becomes the keyboard and the normal human voice becomes its output. The system operates by allowing students to directly access the tutorial group information stored in our database through a push button telephone.

Table 2 below provides a comparison on the effect of IVRS in tutorial group reallocation for a typical OLI course in two different semesters:

The final step of registration is the production of student identity card. Other than the basic information of student name and card no., the student no. in bar code form would also be printed on the identity card. As our library system also integrates with the student system, students can therefore use their bar code identity cards to borrow books in our library.

The Operation of Walk-in Registration

The Walk-in Registration usually starts in early March and early September each year. The exercise will last for about 10 days. One of the main objectives of Walk-in is to maximize the allocation of the remaining course places. The arrangement also gives a second chance to those who missed the Mail-in Registration.

The Walk-in Registration is based on a first come first served philosophy. Applicants can enquire the availability of the course quotas through the enquiry terminals in our campus or through the institute's IVRS over the phone. Applicants can then come to our campus's Walk-in counters to do registration. The payment can be by check or bank's Easy Pay System (EPS). The system also has multiple payment method to provide flexibility for applicants. As the registration is on-line, the confirmation of course place, payment and collection of course materials can be done on the spot.

As there is only limit number of places for some of the courses in Walk-in, students will usually come in the first two days so as to secure course places. The situation in the first day of Walk-in is the worst. Sometimes students have to queue up for 2 hours before they can reach the registration counter. Once at the counter, it would not take too long to complete the registration. For old students, it would take about 1 1/2 minutes to complete the process. For new students, as they prone to ask more questions and also more validations are required, the average processing time is about 5 minutes.

Walk-in Registration is an one-stop on-line course registration system for students. It speeds up the registration process and provides students with a simple and quick means of course registration.

The Technical Aspect of Walk-in Registration

Walk-in Registration is an on-line real time registration and tuition fee collection system. All the registration and payment data are updated instantly into our computer. The update will also trigger the course quota, IVRS and course material collection information in other databases automatically. In the design, we have to pay special attention on the data integrity, recovery and processing time.

We use ORACLE and its 4th generation language to implement the system. The database engine looks after its data integrity. Even in the case of system down, all the committed transactions would be available once the system is up again. The database's built-in data dictionary and the triggers and validations programmed in the system would also guarantee the consistency of data across different databases.

The software and hardware cost of a standby system to backup Walk-in is rather expensive. We opt to revert to manual procedure when the system is down. A thorough system down procedure is provided for the operators and supervisor to handle manual registration and re-inputting of transactions. In the past 3 years, we have conducted 6 Walk-in operations. In these 60 days of operation, we encountered two system failures. In both cases, we managed to fall back to manual procedure smoothly and the system was up again within one hour. As ORACLE only rollbacks confirmation of payment from the bank, the students concerned would be registered. In reality, due to various reasons there are always course places offered not accepted by the students. In the 1995 April Mail-in recruitment, 28,900 course places were offered and only 17,700 of them were accepted by students.

Registry has to be very careful in assigning the offer quota in Mail-in. A reasonable "over-offer" will reduce the unfilled places of the courses. On the other hand, if the offer quota is set at an unreasonable high level, we may not be able to provide enough course places for all the registered students.

On the contrary, the allocation and registration process of Walk-in combine into one. Students have to register the courses and pay the fees immediately once the place are offered. Any non-accepted offer will be released for other students immediately. In the 1995 April Walk-in, the number of courses registered was 4,600.

Mail-in is home basis. Students have to set their course priorities very clearly well beforehand for the computer system to do the allocation. For Walk-in, the students can always get the latest information on course quota through IVRS or enquiry terminals. It is therefore easier for the students to decide their course choices.

This convenience has side effect. As Walk-in is on a first come first served basis, students tend to come on the first 2 days of the registration period. Our statistics showed up to 27% of the Walk-in students registered on the first day of Walk-in. It created a great demand of workload in a very short period of time. In the worst case, some students had to queue up for 2 hours for registration.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

In the institute's perspective, Mail-in registration is good at allocating courses to the right students but it will create unfilled course places as a result of non-accepted offers. Walk-in can maximize the allocation of course places but does not provide the flexibility in course allocation that Mail-in offers. In the applicant's perspective, Mailin is convenient because it is home basis but it takes too long to complete the whole registration. Walk-in requires applicants to come to campus to register personally but it provides instant results to them. Both systems can survive on their own but it is the combination of them gives the best of the two worlds.

OLI provides a proven example of this combination. We are operating both registration systems. The Mail-in which is our first round admission can usually register up to 17,000 course places. The unfilled places together with some new courses will be released in the Walk-in. On average, about 4,500 course places can be registered in this second round of admission.

The processing time for each registration is the total of the time spent on data entry and the response time of the transaction. The response time of the transaction is fast and usually within seconds. It is usually the data entry part which causes delay. In our design, we split the data entry into 2 parts. One is for critical data like student's Hong Kong Identity card number, student's name contact telephone number and course registered. The other part is mainly those that can be input later like address, Chinese character codes, date of birth, office telephone number and intended programme of study. At the registration counter, we only enter the critical data into the computer. The non-essential part will be captured into the computer in the less busy period. By doing so, the processing time of the new applicant in the registration counter can be reduced to an acceptable limit.

Comparison of Mail-in and Walk-in Registration

The Mail-in and Walk-in are two different approaches of registration. It has its own merit. In this paper, I would only concentrate on the comparison In the areas of allocation flexibility, course quota and course choice.

The Walk-in is based on a first come first served philosophy. There is no allocation algorithm built-in. Whereas for Mail-in, the allocation algorithm has been enhanced several times in the past few years as a result of our institute's rapid expansion. It can now handle most of the institute's requirements in allocating students.

Due to openness and fairness, random is still the main algorithm in our allocation method. We also have algorithms in our allocation process which can look after the interest of our final year students. The algorithms can let those who are on the final year of study to secure higher level course places related to their curriculums first. This will ensure courses will be given to the most needed and also reduce the chance of delaying the graduation of our students. For the professional degree courses, we have algorithms that can give priority to those who have acquired the professional requirements and will be benefited most from the courses. At the moment, most of the courses for Bachelor of Nursing and Bachelor of Education are allocated by this method.

The Walk-in is easy and simple. It works well for those junior courses with ample places. For advanced and professional level courses where the course places are limited, the system cannot balance the needs of different type of students.

In Mail-in, the allocation and registration are different processes. Students are first allocated places according to their preferences and institute's quotas.

FUTURE DEVELOPMENT

As OLI will be moving towards the direction of virtual campus. We are now providing Electronic Bulletin Board (EBB) service to our postgraduate students and computing courses students. We are also working on a project of providing electronic library to students. The concept of virtual campus can be further extended to cover the procedures in admission and registration.

IVRS and EBB will be the technologies we will be focusing on. Mail-in may be replaced by a Phone-in first round registration system. The Phone-in first round system will basically allow students to use IVRS and EBB to submit their applications electronically. After course allocation, students can use the EBB or IVRS to enquire the courses allocated. With the coordination of the banks, students may be able to use the IVRS to pay course fees. Walk-in could be replaced by a Phone-in second round registration system. Same as Phone-in first round, the second round registration will also use IVRS. It will be operated on a first come first served basis. Students can ring up and do course quota enquiry, registration, payment and tutor group selection at one go. The technologies are there and the implementation of such virtual campus registration system is just a matter of time.

REFERENCE

Hong Kong 1991, Hong Kong Government
Hong Kona 1995, Hong Kong Government