SWOT Analysis

Strengths

• Building an Online Community for University students to share knowledge and interests
• Through this Online Community the University students can make more new friends.
• It can also allow students who are not able to attend university regularly, or study by distance, to keep up to date with university developments and make new friends.
• University Students Virtual Community (USVC) portal provides news, lifestyle and entertainment for all University students.
• Building an networking relationship between employers and students. Could also be used for work experience programs and graduate recruitment.
• Uni students tend to have good levels of general computer skills. Meaning they wouldn’t have too much difficulty using this VC.
• This proposal mentions different phases in System Development Life Cycle and it also indicates the time schedule of different phases. It also provides useful information for the testing phase.

Weaknesses

• There will have a diverse background of university students from different specialised areas, sometimes, it may have difficulties to maintain harmony if there are some aggressive students.
• Different students may have different social and cultural aspect that may affect the harmony.
• Funding for setting up this online community will be a problem unless there are some sponsorship from the University or Student Union or students paying a fee for use.
• Although it mentions about the uses of the applications of Bulletin boards, Chat Rooms, Newsletters but no clear indication that which communication tools will be using.
• Building a VC that will appeal to students from many diverse faculties and areas of study may be difficult.
• The language of English is not the main language spoken by the students and there is no multi-lingual features discussed in the proposal.
• There is no disaster recovery strategies in place should the community technology not be operational.

Opportunities

• Give university students a channel to share their experiences, feelings, knowledge and study resources.
• Chat allows members to see who is online, so that they may interact about certain topics within the online community.
• Allow greater interactivity between students and university administration, in informal environment
• Develop better relationships between lecturers and students, as the community allows lecturers answer queries from students outside of lecture hours
• Increase awareness of technological developments via this new medium/community
• Companies can increase their profile to students by promoting to the student community their business activities
• University can promote themselves on a global scale and utilise opportunities that may arise from it

Threats

• The proposal assumes that people (university students) are basically good but nobody can guarantee this
• Different students may have different financial background, some students may have high end computer with fast broadband Internet connection and some may have low ends computers with low speed Internet connection, this will create differences and have digital divide. Need to ensure adequate quality of service for all types of internet connection.
• There may certain students who are technically illiterate and will be disadvantaged by not being able to use the community.
• Some universities may not want to participate, they may be trying to set up a VC just for their uni.