Flexible Enrollment Information System Eres 2: A Tool For Managing Teaching Activities

The increasing need for smooth management of all academic and administrative activities, and requirements for more efficient utilization of limited academic resources (academic staff, space, laboratory equipment and financial resources) imply increased needs for more cost-effective organization and better resource management in universities. The managerial and organizational issues are more complex for those universities which have introduced the modular system of studies, or so called Flexible Indiuidua~ Enrolbnent System (FIES) for students. The Faculty of Electronics and Information Technology is the first academic institution in Poland to have introduced FIES, in 1990. FIES allows all students to study individually. It gives substantial flexibility of studies, where students can select their own menu of lectures, as well as the individual workloads and timetables. They also may select some variants of similar or equivalent lectures. Credit points are attached to courses, and students individually select courses and collect the required credits by the end of each phase of study. The introduction of FIES creates many managerial problems at the university. An appropriate information system for computer-assisted enrollment and computer-aided management of academic activities is not only an important help, but is a must in order to achieve performance and proper organization of all university activities. A crucial feature of many universities is that they have to operate at a relatively low budget. It is hence important to develop and implement an information system that will provide proper organization, flexible management of university activities and efficient utilization of all university resources at low cost. In this paper we present our experience with the development of a second generation of a novel, cost-effective information system ERES 2 for flexible individual enrollment and computer-aided administration and management of a faculty. Special care is devoted to the design and organizational issues.