DESIGN AND IMPLEMENT STUDENT REGISTRATION AND ONLINE PAYMENT PORTAL.A RESEARCH PROJECT MATERIAL ON COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION
CHAPTER ONE
BACK GROUND OF STUDY
1.1 INTRODUCTION
The trend shows that more Nigerians do financial transactions electronically via banks ATMs, internet banking and SMS-banking. It was reported that in Nigeria major bank, the number of ATM transactions is 3.5 to 4 million (of total 5 million transactions) in a single day. In another bank, the ATM transactions are increased by 32% annually. Still, the banks in Nigeria seem to be confident that the ATM transactions would keep on increasing in the next several years as they continue to add more ATMs in the entire areas of Nigeria. As reported, currently, web technology has also been used widely. In line with this trend, the internet transactions in Nigeria are also increased fantastically (up to87% in a single quarter) so is the SMS and mobile banking transactions. With this trend, it could be said that conducting transactions electronically has been becoming necessity and way of life of Nigerians.
By considering the trend, it is necessary that higher education institutions (HEIs) in Nigeria, where most depend on the students’ fees to operate, provide electronic payment services for the students. Since students in an HEI might origin from all over area of Nigeria, and their fees might be paid directly by their parents, it would be best if the payment system could be accessed through the banks wide ATM network, internet, and cellular network established in
Nigeria. What a pity, though, the result of our survey on the HEI websites reveals that among more than 3000 HEIs in Nigeria, only less than one thousand have been operating “online system payment” where most of their online systems accept payment transactions conducted in limited or a few banks network only. Certainly, this could be considered as a drawback in terms of catching up with IT use and fulfilling the Nigerians needs of electronic transactions. By conducting limited survey on a few HEIs, I also found the fact that the financial HEI managements nowadays still encounter problems related to balancing the total of student bills with the actual payment made. They are also having difficulties in generating the up to date yet accurate financial reports. These, of course, cause inefficiencies in the HEIs.
Developing Electronic Payment System (EPS) to handle union bills and payment is a complex task, since students’ and parents’ behavior as well as their needs, HEI management requirement, integration with the academic information system, IT infrastructure, banks products offered and banks collaboration must be addressed. The task is also challenging as the literatures acknowledge that IT projects are high-risk. (It was reported that 34% of IT projects were late or over budget, 31% were abandoned, scaled back or modified, only 24% were completed on time and on budget. Also reported that only 28% of software development projects were successful.)
Contributions: Despite the urgent needs of EPS for HEIs and the challenge in developing one, we could find research results of EPS concerning with e-commerce or government institutions only. Therefore, this paper is intended to contribute in presenting the development method and model of EPS for student unions (a HEIs type with the largest number in Nigeria), which specifically ensure the project success. Our approach is: We define the key success factors in the early stage of requirement gathering, then, in the following stages, the student union government policies and system models are designed in such a way to ensure that key success factors are achieved. As the banks maintain confidentiality of their system for the sake of security, detailed discussion of the system development could only be presented for the system component owned by the student union. The research is conducted in a well-known polytechnic in Nigeria.
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