mykeels / college-portal

A university portal software. This project now being rebuilt with Laravel PHP at https://github.com/college-portal/college-portal

Open Source College Portal

An open source portal for tertiary institutions in Nigeria, brought to you by the DevCenter Community.

Why are we doing this?

The Problem:

Ade has recently gotten admission into the University of Ibadan. He is to go through the registration process including the various payments, and course registration with the university online portal.

He uploads his WAEC and GCE certificates and submits.

It's successful.

However, when he checks the page to view them, they are not there.

Where are they?

Turns out there's a bug on the portal and Ade has to report it to the registrar.

It takes two weeks for the problem to be solved because it has to be reported to the company that built and manages the portal.

The Proposed Solution:

An open source college portal for interested Nigerian universities to make use of for student registration and study management.

The processes Nigerian universities use for student registration are very similar, making it possible to manage them with a common open system.

Advantages:

• When there is a bug, it can be easily managed via GitHub issues
• Students can make pull requests for issues they find
• Students have a better experience because when an issue is solved, every university using the system is affected.
• It could be the first introduction for many Nigerian students to open source software.
• Large user base
• Analytics

Risks and possible mitigating factors:

• Nigerian universities not wanting to use it because of skepticism
  • Presentation and Marketing will matter a lot
  • Many new Nigerian universities need portals
• It's a huge project ... Where will the finance come from?
  • @ghost_worker gave a pretty cool idea ... While the software itself is free and every university is encouraged to use it, the universities may require help with setup and management which will not be free.
• What if setup+management makes a profit? Who gets it?
  • Charity
    • Many Nigerian students cannot afford fees
  • Donations to relief funds from the open source community
  • Could be used to teach Nigerian kids to code