Design and Evaluation of an Integrated Smart School Management System

Due to the inefficiency of the manual and paper-based documentation system, most primary and secondary Schools administrators in South-West Nigeria have introduced partial automated systems. Thus, in Schools where results are automated, it is partial computerization as they are not comprehensive enough to handle all issues of result processing. In some other Schools, only the School website can be found showcasing the School to the world with no provision for result processing and other routine tasks. Thus, there exists a fragmentation of systems: either result processing system or a website system but certainly not both. It is against this background that an integrated smart School management system, in this study referred to as eSchool Manager was developed. The eSchool Manager integrates a School website and a School portal, offering a unified digital solution for managing School operations, communications, and resources. The website, which is open to the public, does not require login details. On the other hand, the portal is the engine room of the eSchool Manager with privacy control mechanisms. It handles the marking of the class attendance, result processing, other students’ data, AI-enabled teaching and other tasks such as library operations, financial operations, equipment and inventory operations, School bus tracking, hostel allocation, etc. The eSchool Manager was thoroughly tested and deployed for use by the sampled Schools. Thereafter, the users’ satisfaction were measured alongside with the systems being used by the sampled Schools. The results showed that the eSchool Manager has an excellent user acceptance level with an average score of 82%. Furthermore, the cost of running eSchool Manager was lower than the cost of running the two systems (School website and School portal) independently.