Abstract

CrsMgr, The Course Manager System, is developed as our contribution to the free open source community. It is a web-based application for managing the administrative tasks and information for university level courses. The system is designed with the role-based access control (RBAC) approach; a user of the system could have multiple system access roles. There are 10 system access roles; they are System Administrator, Department Administrator, Course Coordinator, Course Instructor, Thesis Supervisor, Course Student, Course Marker, Course Tutor, Lab Tutor, and Graduate Student. The system provides a wide range of functionalities for each of these access roles. For example, a course instructor can manage information such as student list, student submissions for assignments, student grades, project groups, teaching materials, and online assessments. For student users, it provides functionalities to access course materials, to upload assignments and get feedback for their works, to form project groups and conduct peer reviews for group works, and to take online assessments. For markers, it provides features to grade assignments and projects and to give feedback online, hence the usage of paper is eliminated. The system is designed and implemented with typical three-tier client-server architecture, which consist of the user interface tier, the processing management tier, and the database management tier. The client side user interface tier is made up of HTML pages, and the server side database management tier uses MySQL as the DBMS. In between these two tires is the processing management tier, which uses PHP as the scripting language.