Enhancing Course Timetable Management in Science Classrooms with User-oriented Mobile Application: Analysis and Prototype Development on KMUTT-ESC Case Study

Abstract

In Science schools, one of the challenging issues in learning management is course timetable for both learners and teachers. Unlike regular schools, most Science courses are provided in topic/module-based; that is the topics among courses are associated to each other, managed by several teachers simultaneously, learned by different groups of students, and altered frequently without notice. This causes a crisis for teachers who teach on the same topics being not aware of that changes leading to miss teaching management, while students could not prepare themselves for learning materials, reviews, assignments, etc. accordingly. As technology advances, mobile application has widely been accepted as an effective means to cope various management problems in the real time. Therefore, in this study, we proposed a design of mobile application prototype with user-oriented design to tackle such common problems in Science schools. A case of an Engineering Science School in central Bangkok, Thailand was studied for the actual problems and for the requirement analysis. The application was designed based on users’ UX/UI concepts and mobile platforms; whereas a prototype was developed with xCode based on MVC strategy. This application could help students and teachers to access the real-time changes of the timetable information, including notifications and history revisions; meanwhile, it helps them get ready for the class and finally would enhance more effective learning and teaching in science classrooms. In addition to that, an experiment has been conducted with users to examine the effectiveness of the application, while the feedback has been collected and analyzed for further development. The findings of this study not only showed that the proposed application was more effective than the conventional approach, but also provides any Science schools with similar contexts a practical guideline to cope with such complexity in timetable management ofscience classrooms.