Abstract
Information technology instruments are a very important asset in the hands of every manager. The higher education institutions make no exception from these rules. The exposure to the modern technology and communication tools is very quickly assimilated by students, who acquire the skills to address and even master it and have high expectations from the university they study in to provide them with accurate and real-time information on their particular needs. The management of the university should have at its hand data on students, including personal data, data on academic achievements of any kind, housing in hostels, due and paid tuition fees, data on research, emphasizing both resources allocated and the results obtained, even providing links to online platforms and databases that index these results. The authors approach both operational databases and decision-oriented data warehouses and will aim to capitalize their own research interests in the field of IT to synthesize a set of solutions for this type of software.
TopBackground
Information technology in education, according to foreign specialists - is defined as a combination of processes and tools involved in addressing educational needs, using computers and other electronic resources and technologies (Ball & Levy, 2008; Roblyer, 2006), and information technology applications in education are called “educational technologies” (Bernard & Abrami, 2004; Kingsley, 2007). In education, an example of IT is the type of wireless connection used for online learning, management systems, Internet technologies, high-speed communication infrastructure, emerging technologies for visual presentation, access to course materials through Internet resources and artificial intelligence (Ball and Levy, 2008). A classification of educational technologies is made by them in three categories, as follows: (1) training, (2) productivity, (3) administration.
Nowadays, most academics use ICT Information Applications - for teaching purposes, such as tutorials, research, simulations, and other forms of instruction. The use of online learning systems by faculties is more and more frequent, Bernard and Abrami (2004) suggesting that the use of educational technologies has increased curricular learning between faculties and students that promote constructivism. In addition to the many benefits, the use of information technology also has some challenges (Schmidt, 2002), such as: “the effective replacement of traditional classrooms is one of the greatest challenges in placing the course on the internet.”
Key Terms in this Chapter
Retrieval: Providing information in a form directly usable or for further processing by other applications. The retrieved data may be made available in a form basically the same as it is stored in the database or in a new form obtained by altering or combining existing data from the database.
Database: An organized collection of data, stored and accessed electronically. Database designers typically organize the data to model aspects of reality in a way that supports processes requiring information.
Update: Insertion, modification, and deletion of the actual data.
Information System: A collection of software, hardware, procedures, data, and computer networks used by people in organizations. An information system is used to collect, store, manage, and distribute data to support specific activities. As organizations and their activities have grown more complex, specialized information systems have emerged.
Information and Communications Technology: ( ICT): Extensional term for information technology (IT) that stresses the role of unified communications and the integration of telecommunications (telephone lines and wireless signals), computers as well as necessary enterprise software, middleware, storage, and audio-visual systems, which enable users to access, store, transmit, and manipulate information.
Personal Identification Number: Introducing redundancy is a numeric or alpha-numeric password used in the process of authenticating a user accessing a system.
Administration: Registering and monitoring users, enforcing data security, monitoring performance, maintaining data integrity, dealing with concurrency control, and recovering information that has been corrupted by some event such as an unexpected system failure.