The Development of a Web-based Credit Transfer Application (CTA) for Higher Academic Institution: From Feasibility Study to Testing Phase

Abstract

Credit transfer is the process of transferring course credits of the subject to another programme or another institution to support and promote students’ flexibility in their study by reducing number of courses or subjects required to complete their studies. Currently, the enrolment of new degree students in Kolej Universiti Poly-Tech MARA Kuala Lumpur (KUPTMKL) is using the manual application forms to apply the subject credit transfer. Understandably, the manual process is tedious and students are pruned to make mistake. The objective of this paper is to develop a web-based Credit Transfer Application system (CTA) for Faculty of Computing and Multimedia (FCOM) of KUPTMKL that can be used for the FCOM degree programme Coordinator and student in managing the application of credit transfer with several security applications and mechanisms such as random password, restriction of unsupported file format and database security. The CTA is developed using Agile methodology and Visual Studio Code is used to build the CTA as the code editor to write the programming languages such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Hypertext Pre-processor (PHP) and XAMMP to manage the MySQL databases. In the development of the CTA system, the feasibility study is performed and three methods are used namely, observation, conducting interviews and delivering questionnaires. Based on 100 respondents of FCOM degree students and 5 Coordinators, the result shows more than 95 percent of evidence indicates that the new system developed is able to store, display and manage all information successfully and performed efficiently compared to manual method. CTA can be easily accessed by students and management via the Web.