Online Project Evaluation and Supervision System (oPENs) for final year project proposal development process

The Online Project Assessment and Supervision System (oPENs) is developed with the aim to make it as a standard system that can be used in the Final Year Project (FYP) course for all UiTM campuses offering Diploma in Electrical Engineering (DEE). The main focus of this article is to introduce the system designed, which was developed as a medium of interaction between lecturer, students and course coordinator in managing the FYP process especially in the stage of project's proposal preparation. Two main elements applied in oPENs are project evaluation and weekly report monitoring. In existing system, all hardcopy of the FYP1 related documents such as project approval form, evaluation form, as well as the project progress validation form should be submitted to the course coordinator. This practice sometimes will cause unexpected problems such as loss of forms, lack of documentation storage space, delay of submission of forms and so on. This makes it difficult for the course coordinators to effectively manage the documentation especially if it involves hundreds of students at one time. The oPENs system is developed using language of PHP Technology and the development tools used Macromedia Dreamweaver (which includes a local web server) and Java scripting language. The backend database is supported by MySQL Database, which is built into the database.