The purpose of the project was to develop a Survey System for Ngee Ann Polytechnic to gather feedback on their Diploma Courses and Modules from the students. The main challenge of the project was linking up with the Ngee Ann Polytechnic's existing system to extract data and information on the selected Schools, Courses and Modules for the specific Semesters to be surveyed and comparing the survey results over several semesters and academic years. Other challenges faced were to design and develop the system to run properly with high concurrency (approx 500 concurrent users) as the survey only ran over a short period with a target audience of 14,000 students.
The solution had to cater for the complex multivariate relationships between the students to the modules, the modules to the teaching staff, the modules to the course, the modules to the schools, students to the schools and teaching staff to the courses and the schools. These relationships are closely tied to the entire system starting from the selection of modules to be surveyed, school facilities to be surveyed, student participants, schools involved, courses that relate to students and schools and the teaching staff as well. These defined relationships were then used as bases for establishing which modules and facilities the students would be survey on, the teaching staff who are in charge or tagged to the survey as well as monitoring the progress of the submission of these surveys.
Once the survey is completed, the system then tabulates all 14,000 responses and generates a series of complex reports which provides the statistics in a multi-dimensional information space such as reports of modules over school over students breakdown by the scores and distribution.