Hello Friends, I have been following Open Source/GNU/Linux from quite some time now and am greatly impressed by the depth and amount of knowledge it has to offer. But today I want to leverage it for a greater cause,that of the FOSSilazation of my college.Let me give a brief description of my college.It is a multi-disciplinary institute offering Engineering, Computer Science, Business and Management and some more courses.And it is a new college.I belong to the second batch of Engineers who will graduate from the college this year.All these years what has pained me is the lack of Technology in the college,be it in the computer labs,IT department,Administration or anything directly affecting the students.What I want to propose to the College authorities is the use of Open Source Technologies for the infrastructure.
Some quick facts: 1.My college has around 200 students.(The end-users in question!) 2.My college has more than 500 desktops.Except for some 100 desktops which have Dual-boot (Windows XP/Linux) all other have only Windows. 3.My college has a very crappy and outdated website http://kiit.in which surprisingly is being kept updated because i complained to them. 4.The students across various semesters have little interaction between them firstly,because of the lack of any communication tool and secondly,because we have no free break between lectures except for the lunch break.(Yes,its a damn school in the disguise of a college!). What I would like to see as a student of a college is: 1.A good-looking and informative Website. 2.A Learning Management System to have all the notes/ebooks etc. for 3.A Forum for students to discuss and interact. 4.An automated system for Student Management tasks such as Attendence fine calculation,submission of fee,etc..In short i would like to fill my details on a web form whenever the college needs instead of having to stand in queues to pay fines/fee and run around the campus with receipts from one department to another. :P 5.Any other software/application that reduces paperwork and improves efficiency. Let me narrate a funny scenario from the college.Last semester the Training and Placement Officer got some forms printed and distributed to the students for filling so that they can be used in placement process.What ensued was chaos.Students running here and there with the form,attaching CVs,Training Letters etc. with students not submitting the forms together.And then a student(bakra) was chosen and made to manually enter the data in Excel Sheets.Now if there had been a computerised Student Management System in place,everything would have been so easier.Last week I used a GDocs form for a similar purpose and had 90 student registrations in 40 hours. Needless to say the TPO was impressed,but what is required is to inculcate such a system in the college infrastructure itself. >From the college's point of view,I think they can do with some proxy stuff such as Squid to save on bandwidth,although our college uses Cyberoam client and the block-lists are crappy blocking Facebook, Orkut, twitter and the likes but even blogging sites and other useful links and some CMS stuff. I am asking for your suggestions for OSS under the following categories. 1.Student Management System/Faculty Management System 2.Library Management System 3.A Student Forum 4.A Learning Management System 5.Miscellaneous (covers tools that can be used to reduce paperwork and increase efficiency in routine college administration tasks). If any of you has difficulty comprehending any of the above,just think that you are the owner of a college and what tools would you like to use while planning for the computerisation of the whole infrastrucure.For the moment we are just talking of the students' point of view. -- ~GAURAV LUTHRA~ -- LUG@IITD - http://tinyurl.com/ycueutm
