Thanks for this japhyr. Our project is proceeding on track and on budget and we are going to be piloting in elementary schools by April of this year. Our primary focus now is reporting and business intelligence which will not only produce embedded reports but allow for Ad Hoc and true BI capability so schools and teachers can get real analysis capabilities in a user-friendly dashboard.
Just to clarify our staff consists of myself (IT Director for the Saanich SD) - I am the project lead/sponsor for the district. The eight people include: project manager, product tester/quality assurance, stakeholder business analyst and 5 strong Java programmers, including one developer who is one of the original creators of the PostgresQL database.
We are currently on budget and on track with our build. Incidentally when it comes to attempt to build an open source package to replace a commercial product this is not entirely correct.
Before we began our build we did a complete analysis of the functionality we required in a SIS using our current commercial SIS as the basis. We found that because the commercial SIS was developed for multiple jurisdictions the actual screens and fields we required for British Columbia schools was only 27% of the complete commercial SIS. So we are not crafting a replacement for the commercial but a rather small subset of the requirements targeted specifically for our environment.
another good point. Our district has gone through five, count them five, commercial student information systems because the company has either gone bankrupt, been bought out by a larger vendor or depreciated. We just get our data converted, staff trained and somewhat comfortable and then the rug gets pulled out from under us again and we have to start over.
Anyone who think that commercial vendors are there to support education is dreaming. Commercial vendors are there for two reasons only - earnings per share and profitability.
We will absolutely not be moving to a commercial vendor with this product. Right now we are creating a not-for-profit society which will be the vehicle to ensure this is maintained as a shared-service dedicated to support IT initiatives in our school districts. We are very tired of being tied to commercial vendors whose sole focus is earnings per share and profitability. In any case please have a look at our business plan and see what our focus is in doing this.
It is a model which could easily be adapted by other jurisdictions whether in Canada the US or anywhere else for that matter.
We are always open for questions, suggestions or comments.
As our funding is completely from the school district we currently have the code on our internal Git. The code itself is based on the Education Community Source license primarily so we can keep the development relevant to British Columbia. Once we have completed the product we intent to release the code to be forked by other jurisdictions to modify for their own purposes.
Please feel free to have a look at the openStudent website for documentation about the system and please ask any and all questions.
I am the Director of IT for the Saanich school district which has incubated this project. There is a lot to say about how we got here but this is a somewhat different project than most other open source student information systems (and all commercial products that we are aware of).
Firstly it is build from the ground up to work as an enterprise system. Meaning rather than just function for a district and its schools our system is architected to function at the provincial or state / district / school level.
The system is designed to accommodate cross-enrolment between schools within a district and between districts. As well it can accommodate continuous entry (year round schools) and is built for conventional as well as distance learning schools.
It is also has a sophisticated security model which considers users at the enterprise level, district level, school level or any combination thereof. In other words you can be a vice-principal at one school (with that view), a teacher in the same school (with that view) and a parent with children in another school district.
The system is also built to work in a distributed hosting model where the primary can be at one site and secondarys at other sites. With the next version of PostgresQL it will be possible to have multiple primaries.
There is so much that is different about this system from the standard SIS. With its capacity to function at the enterprise system it could accommodate an entire state or province.
Right now the system has been licensed under the Education Community Source license (modified Apache 2) to ensure that we have better control of the code but we are definitely looking for input and help into the system and it will be available to other jurisdictions when it is complete.
Have a look at the documenation on our website and I will try and answer any questions or comments relating the the system.
Thanks for all the supportive comments.
Gregg Ferrie
PS if you wonder why this has gotten this much support in a relatively small school district we had already converted most of our servers and workstations to Linux-based diskless clients (approximately 2500 in 18 schools). All of teachers and students are used to using open source software including LibreOffice, Scribus, The Gimp and many more.
gregg