Design architecture of an integrated student activities management system for higher education

This paper proposes a technological platform that provides a holistic and user-friendly interface for the management of information pertaining to co-curricular activities handled by the student bodies in Universiti Teknologi MARA Cawangan Melaka (UiTMCM). The handling of any students activities lie in the collective processes of submitting the proposal, securing the budget, getting the approval, promoting and handling the event, collecting feedbacks, reporting and post-mortem discussion. The management of these activities has been a major concern with the involvement of over 100 student clubs that carry out more than 20 events per week that are vying for a budget. Acquiring the approval for the event proposal, tracking the running of the activities and reporting are some of the factors that created a backlog from the management aspect. These procedures require a physical approach. Therefore, an Interactive Student Activities Management System (iSAMS) was designed and developed through the Waterfall methodology as a one-stop centre to help the UiTMCM Student Affairs Division facilitate the management of the students’ activities. This web-based system is able to track, display and store all the activities information from the proposal application stage until the end which includes tracking of attendance, progress of the event, collecting feedback, reporting of completed activities, storing supporting documents and generating reports for administrative purposes. All of these are done and managed via a secure, online interface in the Student Affairs Division website without physical presence of the students and the administrators. Even though iSAMS is yet to be completely implemented, the study has great potential in the form of a holistic management of students’ co-curricular activities. Going by that, in the end it is hoped that there is going to be a more efficient management of students’ co-curricular activities. © 2021 Karadeniz Technical University. All rights reserved.

Covid19 and Higher Education: A Degree Course Recommender System Based on Personality Using Rule-Based

As a result of the pandemic Covid19 and the enforcement of Movement Control Order (MCO) in Malaysia, it is difficult for the Ministry of Education to explain the selection of courses at the university. Current systems such as “Selangkah ke UiTM,” “eSemak Politeknik” and “EduAdvisor” concentrate only on SPM graduates. As a result, this study proposes a recommendation system that can provide recommendations for the course to suit students’ personalities. Diploma of Computer Science students from the Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Science (FSKM) at UiTM Melaka are selected as a case study. This system uses the rule-based approach that took psychometric test results: “Inventori Minat Kerjaya” and mapped it to the traits needed for the five courses offered at the faculty to help students determine the most appropriate course. This prototype system consists of 170 test questions, and the results of the top 3 IMK personalities are chosen to be mapped to the courses offered. Usability and accuracy testing has been carried out at an average rate of 77.5%, and accuracy is 66.7%.

A Social Media Mining Using Topic Modeling and Sentiment Analysis on Tourism in Malaysia During Covid19

Malaysia’s tourism is affected by the Covid19 pandemic and the MCO implementation, where borders are closed and non-essential activities are halted. Negative effects are also felt by Malaysians and are reflected in social media. This study examines two research questions, finding the issues that Twitter users have been addressing on tourism activities during the MCO period and analyze users’ sentiment regarding their ability to travel after MCO. 5000 data were extracted manually from 11357 data scraped from Twitter, of which 3243 were pre-processed keywords using RapidMiner. The results show that the topic of the debate focuses on three themes, namely the destination of tourism, future planning, and public emotions. In addition, 63% gave a positive view and 22% negative sentiment on domestic tourism. Overall, users of Twitter gave an optimistic outlook on domestic travel and hoped that Covid19 would soon be over.

Adaptation of immersive virtual reality for sustaining tourism attraction to preserve history

Due to the pandemic of Covid-19, the tourism sector faces difficulties sustaining the tourism attraction in Melaka, Malaysia's cultural heritage. Tourists could not visit the physical places easily and need to follow a standard operating procedure such as not encourage children to be around in the public area and limit the number of visitors in one time with a limited time duration. Therefore, this paper focuses on the sustainability of the Melaka cultural heritage for Hang Tuah Village (HTV) history through applying the virtual reality (VR) platform. HTV Digital tourism can be an innovative way to preserve historical artifacts and increase the location's popularity. With the development of immersive VR, tourists can explore the HTV and interact with historical objects. The historical background of HTV exploration can be done without traveling and expose to the risk of Covid-19 and damaging the historic site. The functionality of the VR tested using usability testing through the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ), which eventually has 16 dimensions. The five dimensions applied are attractiveness, perspicuity, dependability, usefulness, and novelty. The evaluation is using a 5-point Likert scale with a total number of 17 questionnaires. As a result, the UEQ acceptance of the system is 'High', with 3.875 average overall of the mean score, and 77.5% of the respondents were overwhelming good feedback based on the experience. Thus, with the high acceptance received, it concluded that the adaptation of immersive VR could help sustain the tourism industry to preserve the history of HTV.

Soil moisture monitoring for plant irrigation: A botanic tourism sustainability during Covid-19 pandemic

This paper describes a preliminary study on the adaptation of data visualization and the Internet of Things (IoT) to monitor the soil moisture of plant irrigation to sustain botanic tourism. It is compulsory to perform a daily irrigation schedule until the plants can live independently. However, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, insufficient infrastructure, work rotation at the share-farm, and unpredictable weather, it caused inconvenience for the workers to fulfill the irrigation routines twice a day. Hence, this research aimed to design and develop a mobile-based application with monitoring features that could help workers to monitor and visualize the soil moisture at the botanical area. It is using data visualization technique and enables them to perform irrigation remotely through the application via the IoT connection that linked to a water pump. It is proven that all the features of the system were functioning well and managed to receive good system usability of 77.4%. © 2020, World Academy of Research in Science and Engineering. All rights reserved.