CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1  BACKGROUND OF STUDY

Hostel by definition is an establishment which provides cheap food and lodging for specific group of people, it is also seen as a home for students when staying away from their home. It has large well ventilated dormitories and single rooms and is situated in the school premises. Providing clean and calm hostel accommodation is one of the key responsible of school management. To manage the hostel facilities, a lot of data need to be maintained such as number of student hostel can accommodate, hostel rules and regulation, hostel fee, hostel in and out
of student, guest and visitor record and so on. So, this needs the system which has an ability to capture all kind of data and information and analyze it properly for smooth functioning of the hostel. Hostel warden can easily maintain the data.
Hostel Management in schools often involves administering of all activities of students. All these still remain difficult and require some job for the top management. Hostel Management functions and responsibilities in modern day schools have always been a problem in managing, because of the manual system method of tools they use. Hostel Management System is well designed specially to meet challenges of administrative set up of any school. Hostel Management System (HMS) can be used to assist in student’s allocation, setup hostel information, hostel application, and visitor management. In short, this system will
assist the staff in managing some of the hostel activities.

Computer as indispensible tools in the total life of human endeavor has gained precedence in the world especially in the development growth of the Nigeria society.  Computers are super machines that convert physical/mental effort into a mere easy life. The use of computer in our everyday life cannot be over emphasized. This is because of the gradual increase in human population and complexity of life, which has equally brought about increase in volumes of data being generated every day. The gradual increase in human population has equally affected the education sector. Thus higher institutions in the country today are currently faced with the challenges of hostels/halls allocation to students. The fact remain that the number of students usually out numbers the available accommodation. It is safe to say that most activities such as hostel allocation that are carried out in most universities in Nigeria are done manually. Therefore, there is a lot of strain on the individuals running the hostel allocation. An E-hostel system is simply software developed for managing most activities that take place in the hostels with the help of a hostel administrator [Prof. Peter A, 2017].

The hostel management system is web based software to provide college students accommodation to the university hostel more efficiently. This project also keeps details of the hostellers and applied students. It is headed by Warden. He will be the administrator. This document is intended to minimize human works and make hostel allocation an easier job for students and hostel authorities by providing online application for hostel, automatically select the students from the waiting list and mess calculation, complaint registration, notice board etc. etc. Students will get approval notification in their mails. Hostellers can view notice board, hostel fee and mess menu by login into the online system. The goal of this research work is to provide a solution to the problem of hostel management, by designing a computerized system which is user-friendly and GUI-oriented that will be compatible with the existing manual system. The system will solve the problem of hostel management; thus helping to reduce problems associated with the manual hostel management system.

1.2  STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

There are a lot of drawbacks in keeping and maintaining a hostel using the current method of management. Since most hostels are being run by only one hostel manager. The number of students in a room is sometimes not known by the officer. He has to go room by room to ensure that a room is occupied or not. Some many known problems include:

i. Since the management is paper-based, the possibility of losing data is very high. Lots of papers are required to store all the information and data could be misplaced due to human error, natural disaster or in the event of a break in.

ii. People might not end up with the room originally allocated to them. This change may not be readily effected on the paper. This brings confusion later on as to which room is empty or occupied. Some hostels have a lot of rooms; it would be very tedious to go through all the rooms in search of a free room for an applicant.

iii. Students at the beginning of each session waste half of the semester looking for accommodation because the officer might not know the number of students in a room or know if a room is full or not. To avoid over allocation, the officer will not allocate a room when there are still enough bed spaces.

iv. It usually takes time to retrieve data or information that has been stored, because the workers need to find the actual folder where the data was stored previously. In turn, the hostel administrators would not be able to give accurate information of the occupancy of a particular room.

1.3  OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

The main objective of this study is to design and implement a web-based hostel allocation system capable of general room allocation. The project is designed to help in the management of hostel allocation to students in the University. To achieve the stated objective, the following specific objectives were laid out:

1) To develop a secured central database system that will contain information on all the available rooms in the hostel and allocations done on them.

2) To implement the system using web based technologies to solve the problem of up to date information. Any change to the data in the system readily be updated to all users.

3) To display list of currently allocated students in hostel, the number of students per room and remaining bed spaces.

4) . To be able to generate reports on hostel occupancy and print out the evidence of hostel space being allocated to a student

1.4  SCOPE OF THE STUDY

The scope of this research work is centred on the development of hostel management system for College of Agriculture Lafia. This project which is web-based, automates the student’s hostel application process, allocates rooms to students, notifies students of their application status anytime they log onto the portal and also maintains the integrity of the information being processed by using password to limit access to only approved individuals. The system also creates automatic database for the storage of students and staff information.

1.5  SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

The importance of this thesis cannot be overemphasized. The development of this work has enlightened me more on web development. PHP codes that was scary before the commencement of this project has become easy to understand.

The system will also be of importance to institution and general hostel or house managers as it will ease to a great extent the hostel management processes. Some of its importance to them includes:

i. The system will enable the students get their hostel room before the lectures will commence every semester.