ITB pitches e-payment system in schools

Institut Teknologi Brunei (ITB) has successfully made it through to the latest stage of the 2010/11 Think Big Business Plan Competition, thanks to a proposal to create an electronic fee payment system for use in schools.

"Basically, there are three technologies combined into one, to make it more secure, efficient, faster and a better processing system to handle school fee-paying processes and automate it to eliminate the manual processes such as file searching and manual labour," said Ya-Anenawati Hj Md Yusuf, a member of the ITB group shortlisted for the contest.

The group hopes the system will also address the problem of overdue school fees because of the students losing the notices and reminders issued in paper form to their parents.

The group said using available technologies is an attempt to speed up the process and ensure that there is a way to follow up with parents on fee payments quickly. "It's just convenient ... for the students, for the parents, (and) the school."

The three-in-one device would also build a higher level of trust between schools and parents with a trackable and more efficient payment system.

The group has since created a computer database of all students' file information to facilitate the proposal idea.

"That's the core one, we need the database," said Ya-Anenawati.

No prototype has been created to test this three-in-one technology so far, the group said, but they would hopefully impress the judges to give them the ability to produce the device and eventually distribute the device in schools across the nation. "We hope to make it a standard across the schools and (under) the Ministry of Education," said Ya-Anenawati, adding that the group is currently at the stage of designing and coming up to development. "A private school ... will be selected as pilot testing ground ... and we are choosing one of the private schools as a pilot but it's not confirmed yet."

If they are successful in the Think Big Business Plan Competition, the group said would also need assistance from the government and the private sector to ensure the device is able to be utilised across schools.

Nor Azarina Hj Moksin, another member of the ITB group, said that the idea for the device was originally part of a final research project for a course at ITB and they were recommended to try out for the Think Big competition.

With a diverse background on multimedia, commercial systems and computing to back up their proposal, the group is happy to have made it thus far, crediting the iCentre for helping them with coming up with the idea in the first place. "When they made a briefing for us, they said to just look at your daily life (and see) what can you make computerised, fun and innovative?"

Thus was born ITB's entry for the Think Big competition.

The Brunei Times