How it Works:

  1. Sign Up: The user is greeted with a WordPress site, ideally redirected to from the college's main website. This is quite common in most modern colleges, that offer a web sign up, asking for a wide range of inputs, credentials, qualifications, documents and details. For the sake of simplicity, we have used very few sign up criteria.
  2. Accessing Sign Up/Form Data: There are two ways to access this data, one from Flamingo's storage, which stores all the submitted data, and the Google Sheets form which is synced by CF7 Google Sheet Connector extension for WordPress.
  3. Verifying the Entered Information: Faculty in-charge of admissions will have write access to the Google Sheets document. Then, the faculty will interview the candidate and get the fees officially(there is also scope for a payment portal here). Any candidates rejected or more, can be manually removed by deleting the row from the Google Sheets document. Candidates who sign up offline can also be added to the Google Sheets document manually or asked to fill out the form digitally.
  4. Importing it into our Student Information System Program: The faculty then exports the .csv file from the Google Sheets document and Imports it from RosarioSIS's dashboard, the Student Information System chosen for this demonstration.
  5. 1-5 Years of Courses: The day to day lessons, events, clubs, activities and exams go on for the students. Most of this is documented in the SIS software, like Marks, Assignments, Deadlines, Timetables, and more. RosarioSIS also has a fairly good official plugin for Moodle integration in case the Institution wants to offer an Online Course with or without certification, or grades tied to a subject. When permissions are set correctly, parents, faculty, management and more can get access to all this information, with a login and a few clicks!
  6. Job Placement Portal, by the Institution: The institution can advertise its own job portal to companies, encouraging them to create job postings and opportunities for the students. On sign up, these students will have access to different tiers of work/training, based on their experience and seniority.
  7. Forum/Platform for Alumni, Students, and Faculty: After the student has gotten placement, they can interact with new students, virtually "hang out" with them, solving doubts, sharing tips and enabling them to access study material like last year papers, online sources for notes, etc. There is also scope for faculty clearing doubts here.

Software Used:

  1. Wordpress: "Open source software which you can use to easily create a beautiful website, blog, or app." - https://wordpress.org Wordpress was chosen since I was familiar with Contact Form 7 and an extension to sync submitted data to Google Sheets. It can also be stylized to the user's needs, allowing for beautiful forms. License: GPLv2 (or later)

    1.1: Contact Form 7: "Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on." - WordPress Plugin License: GPL v2

    1.2: CF7 Google Sheet Connector: "CF7 Google Sheet connector is a powerful and flexible connector bridge between WordPress Contact Form 7 and Google Sheet without the high costs." - Site License: GPL v2

    1.3: Flamingo: "Flamingo is a message storage plugin originally created for Contact Form 7, which doesn’t store submitted messages." - WordPress Plugin License: GPL v2

  2. Grav: "Grav is a free software, self-hosted content management system (CMS) written in the PHP programming language and based on the Symfony web application framework. It uses a flat file database for both backend and frontend. Grav is designed to have a shallow learning curve, and to be easy to set up." - Wikipedia License: MIT License

  3. RosarioSIS: "RosarioSIS is a Free & open source Student Information System (SIS), also known as School Management System (SMS) or even School ERP.

    3.1: Student Import Plugin(Official): "Import Students from a CSV or Excel file. Easily bulk upload your Students database to RosarioSIS. Optionally send email notification to Students (if Username, Password, Email Address are set and Attendance Start Date this School Year is on or before today). Import Students info (general & custom fields), enroll them & eventually create accounts." - [RosarioSIS Module]() License: MIT License

RosarioSIS features students demographics, grades, scheduling, attendance, student billing, discipline & food service modules for school management, in one web-application. Primarily designed for K-12 schools, it will easily fit for any educational institution (college, university, academy or institute). " - Site License: GPL v2

List of links:

Write-up: https://presentationbca.duckdns.org

Sign up form: https://presentationbca.duckdns.org/wp

Student Information System: https://bcacollege.duckdns.org

Google Forms link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hs3k_tNK5P5DMUf6kUaBMNzcaxUdKul1B6m2u60Cr14/edit?usp=sharing

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