First post, go easy! Trying to determine development technique for a final year university computing project?

I'm approximately halfway through my undergraduate dissertation, which is 25,000 words, and requires the build of a computer system (in order to demonstrate computer skills). Important to note at this stage, I do not consider myself as a technical person, so please consider this when responding.

I have decided to go down the route of attendance monitoring within higher education (yawn zZzZzZ) as the literature available was vast. Initially I thought to build the system with Microsoft Visual Basic 2013 and link it to a back-end MS Access DB, as the system is not required to run online, it can be ran locally on a desktop. However, research conducted through interviews and self-completion questionaries' raised probing questions as to why the system was not being developed using a web-based application (i.e PHP, HTML, CSS).

A database must exist, to allow system users (Student & Staff), to add/retrieve/modify/delete attendance records. The system should have restricted views in place, to prevent students viewing the attendance record of their cohort. The database will contain dummy data, therefor storage is not a concern. Ideally, I would like for the user to generate a report of their attendance, and export this to a printable format (word, excel, pdf).

To summarise; I have three questions today for the stack overflow community. 1) Should I use MS VB, and MS Access? 2) Should I create a web application, using PHP for database retrieval;? 3) If option 2 is selected, can anyone recommend a suitable database?

I hope I have provided sufficient information to warrant a response.

One final note, I have approximately 13 weeks till deadline.

Thanks, Andy