Campus life services system / Zarina Zainol, Rozita Yunos and Noorhayati Mohamed Noor

Currently, we are living in a competitive global environment. Therefore, knowledge and skills are key factors in widening the opportunity of success in our life. This is one of the challenges that our university’s students have to face in order to increase their ‘market value’ right after their graduation. Moreover, the minister of education, Datuk Seri Khaled Nordin did mention in one of his speech that entrepreneurship education can help to promote innovation culture and change the mindsets of students. Instead of attending formal academic classes, our students are also required to be involved in extracurricular activities. Undeniably, entrepreneurship is one of the extracurricular activities that will be recommended in preparing the students to become self employed or business owners, instead of becoming employees. Besides enrolling themselves in the entrepreneurship education, there may be other platforms suitable to engage in such activity. This study aims to develop a system that enables students to actively involve in entrepreneurship activity indirectly, yet effectively. The system is entitled “Campus Life Services” system, and was designed to support a few categories of services for the students to promote (or to advertise). They are: 1. Courses (for example cooking class, music, drawing and painting, multimedia programming, specific sport like badminton, swimming and archery, or any other skill-based course whichever appropriate with the students’ knowledge) 2. General (for example, storing space to rent during semester break, house or room renting or hourly basis nanny services) 3. Yearly activity (for example like summer camp and motivational program) The target participants are initially children of university’s staffs. However, in the future the participants will be extended to the community around the university. Many universities abroad have already implemented similar system, and it covers wide range of community services. Some examples are University of Utah, Mac Ewan University and Towson University. The system prototype is currently providing a platform for the students to promote courses only. The other categories will be appended soon. The system was developed using an open source platform, consisting of PHP, MySQL and Apache, on top of Windows as the operating system. PHP is very popular language because it can be embedded directly into HTML coding. It can be used on all major operating systems and can be supported by most of web servers. MySQL was chosen as the database server due to its scalability and flexibility, high performance, high availability and most importantly, is low total cost of ownership. The web server Apache works perfectly with MySQL and PHP, and very well known for it compatibility with any other operating systems. The system prototype has been developed and tested successfully. On top of advertising, registration, viewing information and so on, a short messaging system (SMS) will be sent as reminder when the course date is approaching. The system will give great advantage to the university students in blooming their knowledge and skill. On the other hand, the university staffs may also gain benefit from the system. Nowadays, non-academic skill-based courses are not easy to find. Even if available, the cost would be very high. A cake-baking class cost between RM150-RM250 per person. Not to mention other professional skill-based course like music, painting and so on. Normally, courses conducted by undergraduate students are believed to be cheaper than that of provided by a professional trainer, because they can utilize the faculty’s facility at a cheaper rate. Finally, we have all the courses in the university. Let the students show their skill, increase their knowledge and gain the entrepreneurship experience, through “Campus Life Services” system.