A Tool for Automating IT Management in Small Schools

Abstract

The outbreak of COVID-2019 has resulted in the adaptation of the teaching and learning style in schools to become more online, conducting teaching and learning from any places without classroom meeting. Systems such as School Management, Online Meeting, and Online library, have been deployed to support all school members including students, teachers, parents, and administrators. These systems need to be properly managed. For business enterprises, this job falls on the shoulders of the IT department, which is usually well-staffed and well-equipped as companies realize their competitive edge depends on it. For educational institutions, especially in small schools, only 1 or 2 "computer specialists" assume the responsibility of the whole IT department. This can be overwhelming for them and, when IT tasks are poorly managed, dissatisfaction and productivity loss among school members ensue. This paper describes a system that we have designed and developed called Admin Task Management Center (ATMC). It aims to significantly reduce the manual workload of IT staff in small schools in document management, system monitoring, and other IT-related tasks. Our ATMC is currently being deployed at Satit Kaset IP (Kasetsart University Laboratory School, Center for Educational Research and Development, International Program). Our evaluation shows that the ATMC considerably raises the productivity level of IT staff, as well as other members of the school. We have released version 1 of our ATMC tool as open-source software. It is available on Github.