SOURCE:

Faculty: Physical Sciences
Department: Computer Science

CONTRIBUTORS:

Otuonye A. Ifeanyi
Ejiofor V. E.
Osuagwu O. E.

ABSTRACT:

Revamping the falling standard of university education is one of the foremost challenges of our political leaders in Africa and Nigeria in particular. It has been observed that poor assessment of academic programmes by accrediting agencies is one of the major reasons for the educational downturn experienced in most African countries today. Empirical study carried out to determine the effectiveness level of current Academic Programme Evaluation Model (APEM) for Nigerian universities reveals that the framework is inadequate and does not give a true reflection of the programme’s performance. In spite of the high ratings scored by most academic programmes during accreditation exercises, and despite huge government investment in infrastructure and man-power development, research has shown that Nigerian Universities have continued to produce graduates who lack the requisite knowledge and skill to engage in meaningful employment or compete favorably with their foreign counterparts. With the current APEM in Nigeria, periodic programme assessment may not produce the desired result. Current APEM does not cover important aspects of learning pedagogy in line with the position of several authors whose works were considered in this dissertation. The framework does not even involve the participation of all staff and all students in the evaluation process. There is need to develop an enhanced APEM that improves accuracy of assessment by capturing the programme’s overall impact on students in line with international best practice. This work aims at developing an enhanced APEM that corrects the inadequacies in the existing model. It determines true performance level of existing model; identifies and categorizes all variables, relations, and inadequacies in the existing system that hinder accurate evaluation; develops evaluation models that incorporate vital aspects of learning pedagogy into the scoring criteria; introduces evaluation mechanism that allow unbiased rating by authorized administrators, and to deploy database query and reporting tools for high-level analysis of patterns or trends. The new model developed in this work is both mathematical and graphical, and involved active participation of all faculties, and all students to become part of the academic programme assessment. Other enhancements introduced by our model have made programme assessment to become a day-to-day process, ongoing, and more formative than summative. We adopted the combined Structured System Analysis and Design Methodology (SSADM) and the Object Oriented Analysis and Design Methodology (OOADM) in the analysis and design of the system. The model was implemented by a dynamic web-application of the three-tier architecture having a front-end, a middleware, and a back-end. The middleware application logic was defined using VB.NET programming language and ASP.NET web application/scripting language based on .NET framework 4.0. Microsoft SQL server 2008 was used to design the back-end technology. ADO.NET was used to enable dynamic database interactivity with the web application, while Microsoft IIS express version 7.5 was adopted as the Web server to enable application’s response to user request based on http request. The results of this work include: an empirical report showing that majority of our academics clamour for an improvement in evaluation framework; an enhanced APEM with ten new performance criteria that capture programme’s overall impact on students; new mathematical models that provide ongoing and cumulative assessment; and a novel web application that guarantees automated approach to data capture and trend analysis. The enhanced APEM guarantees assessment that gives true reflection of programme’s performance thereby paving way for hardwork and continuous quality improvement.