As the incoming Director of E-Learning for the new Northumberland Church of England Academy opening September 2009, I've been researching how much Open Source software I can use to power things in the Academy. I am, of course, intending to give Moodle a place in the system along with Mahara for eportfolios. Although it's not OSS, Google Apps Education Edition is free and a very powerful solution, so thinking of going with that as well. I want to spend the tens of thousands of pounds we would ordinarily spend on E-Learning solutions to go to employing someone to develop/code for us and give back to the OSS community.
My stumbling block comes when looking for a Managements Information System (MIS) that is free and Open Source. The two main ones I've come across - FreeMIS (not fully-featured) and SchoolTool (too US-centric) - don't seem to be up to the task. As a consequence, I've got SIMS on my draft diagram.
What I'd like to see at the Academy is a completely OSS E-Learning system pulling data from an OSS MIS, all tied together using Shibboleth for single sign-on.
Has anyone any experience in this area I could lean upon please? 
Derrin Kent gave an interesting talk on Mahara at the recent MoodleMoot. http://tdm.info In terms of MIS, talk to Gary Saddington at Skegness Grammar about Scholarpak. It is designed to be a full MIS system that is open source but not sure how finalised it is yet - maybe your new academy could work with him to set up a more sustainable FOSS MIS project. If nothing is up to it yet I'd go for the system that is least expensive to migrate data from so that when there is something that meets your needs you can easily move your data. That might be SIMS, I don't really know enough of the details. Intuitively a web based MIS system would seem most sensible with no dependencies on other closed source applications. I think SIMS.net is dependent in some ways on MS Office but I'm not 100% sure. If for example, an alternative closed source system, independent of other closed source apps and compliant with open standards, it would be a better bet. It seems to me a bit daft to have the admin system dictating stuff related to learning. Tail wagging the dog.
I'm the developer of FreeMIS. It works for me and my school as a tool for reporting and tracking of pupil progress amongst other things. The source code has been downloaded 6831 times, but I have no idea how many of those downloads resulted in a school actually using FreeMIS.
FreeMIS is perfectly viable as a replacement MIS, but needs a lot of time to be spent coding the unglamorous but necessary features such as returns to local authorities, returns to exam boards etc etc. There are lots of things an MIS has to be able to do before you can call it comprehensive, and I don't frankly see an Open Source project ticking all those boxes unless it has financial support from a big player like BECTA.
I'm sure that Schooltool and Scholarpack (and CLASS by Stuart Johnson for that matter) all have the makings of full solutions. For what it's worth, I would contend that FreeMIS is a good candidate by virtue of it's beiing built using Ruby on Rails. Loads of developers use Ruby on Rails now, and developers would easily get their heads around the code in FreeMIS.
If anyone is claiming to have a comprehensive open source MIS solution, I would take the claim with a large pinch of salt.
Sorry if I sound rather jaded, but I've been involved in the effort to create a replacement MIS for many years now, and have come to realise just what a huge project it is.
Thanks for the replies. I've been playing around with SchoolTool and it seems pretty good. The thing that drew me to it is the fact that, unbeknowst to me, I've read the blog of the lead developer for a while, and that' it's backed by the Mark Shuttleworth Foundation - the guy who puts the money into Ubuntu.
I'd be interested if others could give SchoolTool a quick spin and see what they think!
A powerful, synoptic, interoperable open source school information system would be very nice indeed. I'm hugely impressed by the work that's been done on projects like SchoolTool (which does the calendar and timetable stuff very well indeed, and has serious backing, but isn't MySQL based), ClaSS (written with teachers rather than heads in mind) and FreeMIS, (Ruby on rails, as Robert says), but even I would admit that none of these have the maturity of a project like Moodle. The fact that they don't is significant, reflecting the truth, rarely acknowledged, that MISs don't really matter. They're necessary, I know, but they don't really have much impact on the learning and teaching that happens in a school.
What matters is not management information but teacher knowledge.
A system capable of storing, sharing, searching and supporting the incredible mix of tacit and explicit knowledge of students, subjects and pedagogy held by teachers is, I believe, something that can make a significant difference to leaders' effectiveness, teachers' professionalism and learners' outcomes, in a way that no MIS could.
I would argue that this sort of educational knowledge management engine is not that far removed from what a VLE ought to do. I published some thoughts on this in Naace's Computer Education back in 2006, (preprint online), and collected some empircal data as part of my MBA dissertation. The evolution of Moodle to include things like a site wide gradebook, pupil level confidential notes and competency/objective tracking make it a leading prospect for a school's knowledge management system, in my opinion. Furthermore, Moodle's modular architecture, well documented data structure and the API promised for Moodle 2.0 would allow developers to code up additional functionality, including managing additional pupil level data like contact details. Attendance tracking has already been done as a module, and individual learning plans are on their way. Extending Moodle in this direction would be a useful project for your developer, and perhaps others in the Moodle community. Add in a smart datamining engine and you have something seriously cutting edge. I presented on how Moodle links in with knowledge management back at the '06 moot, a slidecast of which is online.
The proprietary alternatives are, I fear, suboptimal, as Becta put it. My experience is limited to the market leader, but I cannot believe that any open source project would have ended up with an interface that causes so much frustration to its users - I export what I need and work on a set of spreadsheets, my contact manager and calendar, I'm sorry to admit. Yes, I know this is a Bad Thing, and believe me I wouldn't do this if the interface worked properly! It's also the only thing I need Windows for (although I'll admit to preferring Excel 2007 for data analysis too). Unlike LAMP based web apps, getting access to the data stored in most proprietary MIS is seriously non-trivial. There is hope. Becta and others are working hard to establish a common, open standard for interoperability between VLEs, MISs and other systems, through the UK SIF Association.
[quote=mberry]
The proprietary alternatives are, I fear, suboptimal, as Becta put it. My experience is limited to the market leader, but I cannot believe that any open source project would have ended up with an interface that causes so much frustration to its users - I export what I need and work on a set of spreadsheets, my contact manager and calendar, I'm sorry to admit. Yes, I know this is a Bad Thing, and believe me I wouldn't do this if the interface worked properly! It's also the only thing I need Windows for (although I'll admit to preferring Excel 2007 for data analysis too). Unlike LAMP based web apps, getting access to the data stored in most proprietary MIS is seriously non-trivial. There is hope. Becta and others are working hard to establish a common, open standard for interoperability between VLEs, MISs and other systems, through the UK SIF Association.
[/quote]
Indded one of the more difficult aspects is providing for ad-hoc queries and analysis. Exports for use in spreadsheets or DB is one solution. BUT as you point out it has problems. Perhaps the most serious is Data Protection; theoretically anyone can request what data you hold on them and where. If you have lots of little databases/spreadsheets on staff's own machines (or profiles) then it becomes impossible to monitor. Keeping the data on the server make it managable.
On reflection, I tend to agree with Miles that developing Moodle to do all the stuff that an MIS is needed for would be the best way to go. The clear benefit would be that all the hundreds of schools that already use Moodle would then be in a position to ditch the sub-optimal proprietary MIS systems with minimum effort. It's not the end solution that I would choose in an ideal world, but it seems to me to be the only plan that might be able to gather a critical mass of developers behind it.
Any PHP coders with time on their hands??
The problem, as jonesieboy says, is keping up with the ever-changing government (and other) requirements to provide information. This is why SIMS has several updates per year, and why when the Bursar/Exams officer/Timetabler/other has to do her annual task, it is a whole new learning experience, and a whole new bunch of support calls that result in code changes that don't prevent it happening next year!
To stand any chance of being low maintenance the MIS has to be logically based (for stability) minimalist (for supportability), and with good interfaces to general purpose tools that can tweak outputs into the form required (for flexibility).
Failing that, severely prune Whitehall so that the few staff remaining don't have time to keep making unnecessary changes.
Or accept that the taxpayer continues to pour money into the disturbing 'cradle-to-grave' portfolio of government services provided by Capita.
Our schools is based not too far from you, and we have used open source applications for several infrastructure and E learning projects.
You may want to have a look at our case study to see how we have linked Moodle with the Serco MIS solution. I have looked briefly at the open source MIS systems, but they look some way off what we are able to do with our proprietary system. Moodle has provided a great half way house for access to the MIS data though :) I am in contact with the main developer of this extension (and when I find the time I am supposed to be one too!) , but creating a fully featured MIS that is capable of SLASC reports, exam entries, timetable construction, reporting, etc etc is a non trivial proposition, and would need the combined effort of several schools to fund developers for at least a couple of years!
Keeping the MIS seperate from a VLE makes sense in may ways, what is more important is allowing for data to be exchanged by conforming to what ever the agreed data exchange formats are in any given locality. Moodle is open enough to be able to pull data almost any sql based system already :)
Let me know, if you are interested in seeing what we have done.
I think the problems with any MIS are that it is rarely, if ever, designed with you and your school in mind, and that it is huge umbrella.
In my prep school, for example, the MIS has to keep track of the following:
That's just off the top of my head - I'm sure many of those are common to every school, and some are special cases that maybe only apply to a boarding school.
I reckon those things can be split into several sub-systems, e.g. Attendance/Grades/Behaviour Management and Reports would be one lump. Each of those sub-systems is a substantial chunk of work; I would reckon on a couple of weeks of fairly solid development for each chunk.
One factor that noone seems to have mentioned yet is support - if Doug decides to deploy, say SchoolTool, how does he know that the person to replace him is going to be capable of taking that on? At least with SIMS and iSAMS, you have a number to call to get support, even if you're clueless.
That's why I've stuck with commercial or mainstream solutions for many of our services - I can be fairly confident that someone coming in would have Windows skills and would be able to pick up exchange server without too much effort, but if I'd gone with my preference, Solaris + sendmail + mailscanner + uwimap or cyrus + horde/imp & a whole load of Sunrays, I think it would be a millstone for anybody coming in as Head of ICT after me, no matter how well it works.
For things that matter, ask yourself if it passes the "What if I'm hit by a bus" test? We have a duty to the schools we serve to make sure they can go on without us.
Robert Jones has kindly posted a new demo of FreeMIS - http://demo.freemis.org.uk
I have to say, FreeMIS does look good, and is a good starting point to build from, but, as Robert says, it's not a complete MIS, but it does look more like the real deal than SchoolTool, IMHO - i.e. I can imagine my colleagues using it.
Building on top of Moodle does sound like a good choice, but I would be worried that by making Moodle into too big a tool, you would stifle its growth as a learning platform.
Would anyone be interested in speccing out the requirements for an MIS? If so, I've started a mindmap with the top-level functionality that I would expect to see in an MIS solution; feel free to add more and to start adding detail.
To what end? Well, there's clearly a market for an OSS MIS, no matter how much of a challenge it is. Maybe with a few like-minded individuals, a substantial reduction in workload and an increase in pay, some flying pigs and a dose of luck, we might be able to get something going, possibly based on FreeMIS or SchoolTool?
A starting point might be
http://industry.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=20860
the Becta Functional Requirements
The advantage of SIMS is that is does, somewhere, at some point, contain every MIS-related feature that any school needs. It has a good, solid number of developers behind it capable of adding new features as required. It is, in short, your typical (and a reasonably good example of) "enterprise" piece of software. Open Source, as a software development methodology, political movement, or whatever it is, isn't going to replace it (unless a large enterprise wishes to sponser development in a SIMS-alternative just to tick Capita off, much as Sun did with Open Office vs MS Office) because Open Source is bad at enterprise software. What your developer should aim to do is replace SIMS function by function, small web-based app by small web-based app, all tied together with Open standards implemented by Open Source software - or, indeed, commerical software, there being no need to stop people making a profit if they can write a better product. It strikes me that developing on Ruby on Rails, with web apps tied together with Shibboleth, is a good way to go, although I'd aim for language/platform-agnostic APIs just so you can get more developers joining in.
A [long] while back we had this discussion on schoolforge.org.uk and set upa list to discuss the subject. It's been very quiet recently but you might want to look through the archives. It seems little has changed except FreeMIS, Class and schoolTool etc have all evolved to fill their own niche needs.
Back then I was working at Exeter College MIS dept and we used CAPITAs UNITe which like SIMS in the compulsory sector has the FE sector market to itself and though they claimed to be interested in engaging with the OSS community this amounted to signing up to view some documents and a closed API, hardly open..
My view is what is needed more than anything else is a active open development community embracing the collective needs and while we tried to kick something off at schoolforge this really needs to develop around one the projects (or a new one). It's a big hairy subject area with many facets along with varied and changing complex requirements (e.g. SIF anyone?).
As for extending Moodle, I'd say while it could be a component, the requirements are largely off piste and needs to Moodle focus on it's teaching focus. I seem to recall that BECTa's FERL had the concept of a MLE that was a VLE (Moodle) integrated with all the other MIS components to make an integrated system. That seem to be a reasonable model due largely as soo much is shared but much is not.
Anyway those schoolforge.org.uk archives MIAS archives can be found here.
http://groups.google.com/group/sf-uk-mias
--
Steve Lee
OSS Watch - supporting open source in education and research
http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk
I went to meet Capita about 3 years ago with John Ingleby as SF-UK/OSA reps. Capita then made noises about OpenOffice and being more open - they are paranoid about the OFT in relation to their monopoly. Since no more pressure was applied they haven't done anything much as far as I know and are just as tied to other proprietary monopolies as ever. While I agree that the dependencies of MIS on giving information to the LAs and to central government are an added layer of complexity, ask yourself, if this is the main stumbling block, what are LAs and central government doing to provide the leadership to get round it? In the end it is all about value for money and it is pretty obvious that taking some small risks in order to try and achieve better value is the responsibility of goverment whether local or national. My recollection from a BECTA document is that SIMS costs schools something like £165 million a year. Ok, this probably includes support costs but does not take into account the knock-on effects with VLE, e-portfolio, Office software procurement etc. What it shows is that even putting £1m a year into an open source MIS project as a strategic risk in achieving better value is easy to justify even as an R&D experiment. The competition alone would force costs down as we have seen with other licensing costs to schools as FOSS becomes more popular. The big stumbling block is as ever politics. The politicians are too worried about upsetting existing powerful commercial interests. Until there is sufficient political will to provide the leadership to get out of that Catch 22 we are entirely reliant on alternative business models to evolve to challenge the status quo and at present the individuals associated with them don't have the resources. Academies are supposed to be innovating so why not get 10 of them to club together and sponsor a project. Might even be able to get EU grant funding for something like that. SAFE - Schools Admin for Europe.
We are releasing SchoolTool 1.0 on Thursday, so things are feeling considerably less vaporous around here. The code is ready, and if you install SchoolTool you're pretty much looking at the 1.0 code. I just have to update the website, documentation, etc., and the somewhat early arrival of my second daughter threw my schedule off. Regardless, a lot of new features have landed in the past month or so (like report card generation).
We now have user-customizable demographics schemas, so that should bridge part of the gap between US and UK requirements.
How close SchoolTool would be to your needs depends... on your needs. We do have the base of funding from Mark Shuttleworth. Having more schools investing in SchoolTool development and/or support definitely makes it <i>more</i> likely that that support will continue.
Moodle integration in particular is an important piece. We've got SchoolTool/Moodle/Drupal all working with CAS single sign on at SLA in Philadelphia. CAS is lighter-weight than Shibboleth, probably better suited for K-12. I just spoke last week to a school in California who is considering a grant proposal to fund more SchoolTool/Moodle work. If we could get several schools contributing to the effort, we should be able to come up with an excellent tool.
Also, I do have a small international pool of experienced SchoolTool developers available to do this kind of work and offer paid support. None in the UK at this point though.
Hi Everyone,
As the founder of Open Soltuions for Education, I think you may have much of what you need in openSIS, our open source SIS. We are currently in the middle of converting our code to MySQL and it is fully functioning on the PostgreSQL database. Most, if not all, of the functionality I have seen mentioned here is contained in the base system or the add-on modules.
We have worked very hard to make openSIS attractive, functional, OS independent and browser independent. We are currently finishing a project here for the State of Oregon that will bring some new functionality to the scheduling, some new special education features amd greater all around data validation and referential integrity.
We have signed a new client in Abu Dhabi that will be funding the creation of an online admissions/registration module and integration with Active Directory. We are also currently in conversation with a large Middle East organization serving over 100,000 students that, if we get them as a client, will finance the development of openSIS next generation. openSIS NextGen will be a complete redesign effort from the data model up. Our intent is to produce over the next 18 months a system that will rival the largest US systems and provide a true alternative to commercial alternatives. An important point is that we are US based, so our designs are curently US centric, but we have many clients outside of the US that use the system so it can be used successfully elsewhere.
I am not familiar with FreeMIS, but I do know Tom Hoffman who manages SchoolTool, and I am not comfortable with the pace of progress on that project. I know he has a release scheduled for April 30th, so maybe it will have some more dvanced functionality. The other area that makes me wary as well is Zope. I am not familiar with it, but think that it does not have the widespread use that PHP/Zend/Ruby has and thus the support resources may not be as plentiful or the skilled resources may not be avalable.
We operate in a for profit model specifically to generate revenue to further development. Our overall vision is to provide technology equality for all through open source, but we are very committed to being a commercial-like SW shop that has regular consistent development, so we charge for some things to help fund the consistent development. To date, we incorporated in January 2008, 100% of all revenues are flowed back into development in addition to some of my personal money that I contribute time to time to ensure that we stay afloat.
We are working with Chris Whiteley, founder of openZIS, and have a SIF compatible agent for our system as well. openZIS is also UK SIF compatible, so it may be of interest with you guys for integratiing with other applications. Our overall road map inlcudes a ERP like concept mwentioned above. Integration with Moodle will be complete by the end of the summer, openBiblio, Koho or Evergreen for library management will be done by the end of 2009. Mahara is on the map for 2010 and an assessment solution will be a major focus in 2010. We also have an alpha data warehouse as I am the former manager of the IBM Insight at School education data warehouse solution that will be integrated in late 2009 or early 2010.
You can visit our main page at http://os4ed.com and openSIS at http://opensis.com. The openSIS demo is online at http://demo.os4ed.com and you login using admin/admin, teacher/teacher or parent/parent. We have a few students and update attendance and grades and assignments daily so it represents real activity. Weare always interested in partnerships and contributions, so feel free to drop me a note any time: casey [at] os4ed [dot] com
Thanks!
Casey Adams
President and Founder
Open Solutions for Education
I am currently helping produce the timetable using our Serco MIS (Facility) and one the key elements the MIS needs to support is timetabling construction and scheduling. The timetable is key to curriculum delivery, attendance (especially lesson by lesson) and assessment of 99% of curricilum based learning with schools hours.
It would appear that so far many of the open source have not got this key function at the heart of their development. Developing this functionality is also one of the BIG items that would put me off starting as well :)
A good set of timetabling tools that link with assessments, behaviour, attendance etc would help both end user administration and system design.
But that is just my two penneth :) Time to get back to my pies ;)
If I understand correctly, timetabling is an NP-Complete problem. If Wikipedia is correct, solutions are best achived via genetic algorythms. I don't know that such solutions are something that Open Source handles particularly well - GAs would tend to be written by PhD or Masters students investigating something and not neccesarily packaged into something neat and tidy that your average passing PHP programmer might be able to use. I don't know, though - anyone know of any appropriate generic Genetic Algorythm libraries, something where you could feed in some data and maybe an upper bound on time and get a reasonable timetable out of the other end?
Tablix is an open source timetabling application for Linux which uses genetic algorithms, although it's not been updated for a couple of years now. There's also a GUI front end, gtablix. It'd be very interesting to have some reports of its use. Gtablix is in Ubunutu's repositories, and can be installed via 'sudo apt-get install gtablix' or synaptic.
Distributing the various versions of class, teacher and room timetables is something which SchoolTool handles well. Moodle course level events can also be pulled together to form personal timetables.
And, hey, I see SchoolTool 1.0 is due out tomorrow!
Wikipedia links to a bunch of GA libraries written in assorted languages - Java, C++ and Python seem popular, no .Net ones listed but I'm sure they're out there somewhere. Someone will have to go and digest a book on GAs and a paper or two on the Timetabling Problem then produce some code that translates the appropriate GA to something a computer can execute, plus something to get data in and out of it. My approach would be to use one of those Python libraries and integrate with SchoolTool - replace that line in the documentation that says "SchoolTool does not currently generate class rosters or automatically schedule..." with "Featuring a snazzy Genetic Algorithm based automatic timetabling tool!".
Just for information, ScholarPack is to be released before the unconference. I have just quit my job to get it out there. The problem with any MIS in UK is that it must support the governments annual school census. ScholarPack does, and as far as I am aware none of the other Open systems mentioned do (I stand to be corrected). Schooltool indeed does use Zope, but this is not a problem as there are plenty of Zope/Python developers out there who could support it. The thing to watch out for in Schooltool is that they have chosen to use the Zope Object Data Base(ZODB) as the data store rather than a relational database and this could affect scalability and development speed in the future as well as data integrity. As far as timetabling is concerned, ScholarPack can import a timetable produced in other packages such as Keith Johnson's timetabler and use this integrated with all other functions. And lastly as regards money, £20,000 would support ScholarPack development for nearly 2 years, a million would buy me a fanatastic office and support development forever;-)
[quote=garrysaddington]As far as timetabling is concerned, ScholarPack can import a timetable produced in other packages such as Keith Johnson's timetabler and use this integrated with all other functions.[/quote]
Do either ScholarPack or SchoolTool support any kind of report writing feature? It's just that we need one, and I'm hopefully getting some time (an afternoon a week) to put towards developing one, so rather than develope something from scratch I could perhapse assist with an existing application and get it to match our needs. Same goes for a timetabling feature.
Forgot to mention:
http://industry.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=20860
has guided the development of ScholarPack along with some great and long suffering scretaries and teachers!
Hi Doug,
I am the author of the documentation and components used in Moodle and SIMS.net integration. See Here.
We are currently in a process of integrating many of our services in to moodle. We have a similar setup to your diagram but with zimbra instead of google docs. We are currently taking a second look at mahara version 1.1 due to the increased integration with moodle 2.0.
Here is a run down of what services we have integrated
Moodle & SIMS & LDAP
Tom Hoffman has announce the release of SchoolTool 1.0...
I'm happy to announce the release of SchoolTool 1.0. The old-timers
know it has been a long and winding road, and this is just one
milestone along the way.
Overview of features: http://book.schooltool.org/htmlhelp/features.html
Release Notes: http://book.schooltool.org/htmlhelp/jaunty-release-notes.html
Installation: http://book.schooltool.org/htmlhelp/setup.html
Now the fun *really* begins.
---o0o---
Here's a thread on schoolforge-UK's MIAS list
http://groups.google.com/group/sf-uk-mias/browse_thread/thread/fe146b29b9a8a74b#
Would it make sense to have a suite of Flex ( or similar) applets instead or one large MIS?
I'm thinking of a registration application, a performance tracker, a timetabler, etc. each with a very specific task.
The data from each application could be saved in encrypted XML files on the school filesystem, rather than in a database.
The advantages of this approach would seem to be two-fold. Firstly, it would be scalable because an individual teacher could use any appropriate tools even if their school didn't deploy the system (they could save the XML files in their personal remote drive, for example) or a school could deploy it and store appropriate information centrally.
The second advantage is that it would make it much easier for people to contibute to the project - by writing an applet to import/export from another MIS or creating a new reporting tool, for example.
Please forgive me if this makes no sense at all, but I really think it would make sense to produce something that could be used both by individuals and whole institutions and nothing available at the moment seems to do that.
best.
Harry
> Would it make sense to have a suite of Flex ( or similar) applets instead or one large MIS?
Yes, exactly. I'd avoid picking any one particular server platform though, just aim to have smaller applications tied together through a standardised API and/or data interchange format of some kind.
> I'm thinking of a registration application, a performance tracker, a timetabler
Our school needs a pupil-report writing tool, an exam results statistics and graphing package and a room booking system. My plan is to write an application for each, using an LDAP server (in turn linked to our SIMS server) or Moodle server to provide user login information and class / group membership data.
> The data from each application could be saved in encrypted XML files on the school filesystem, rather than in a database.
Each application should use whatever is most appropriate. Avoiding databases completly would freak lots of people out - there's a whole generation of PHP programmers out there who've never had to think about how to ensure atomic transactions on data. You could use something like SQLite if you didn't want end users to have to install a database. This is where I favour Java as a development platform - you can bundle everything up into a single self-contained JAR file that will run as a web server on any system with the Java runtime installed, no need for end users to mess around figuring out how to install databases.
Have you seen the work Scott Wilson is doing on the wookie widget server, it drifts into the area you are talking about
:http://zope.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=20090601115357
Dear all,
There seems a lot of thought along the same lines here and my CEO and myself seem to be leaning the same way as Doug Belshaw in not wanting to spend 50,000 sterling on commercial software. We would also be willing to put some money into software development if we could help take the project further on a quicker timeline. Like many of the users have previously commented we need a good reporting and functioning School Management System following the basic BECTA requirements and would love this to be open source.
I am considering coming to the UK for the conference from Kenya (we are a group of British schools based here) but would like to meet up with other like minded people for a possible joint venture. If your interested let me know, including which school (or company) you are from and we will see what we can arrange at the unconference.
With regard to Doug good luck with the new academy I'm originally from Morpeth would love to see how its developing are you planning to use open source throughout - we use Edubuntu and the kids love it.
Thanks
James Dyson
Braeburn Group of School (Kenya) Ltd
It appears to me that since 90% or so of UK education is in the state sector, any uk-centric MIS system must be designed to meet state sector requirements, which are in principal to make available and accept data according to the structure of the CBDS referenced above by myself and others. In practice it needs to be able to do that on the basis of an authorised mouse click, not as with some tape backups of yesteryear, you can get the data out if you pay a software engineer to come in and get it for you.
I am not sure we have been distinguishing very clearly, between the mathematically complicated bits that do timetables and options, but don't necessarily hold a lot of personal data (it should be possible to write a timetable without reference to any personal data) and the dull, boring bits, like attendance, which hold substantial quantities of highly sensitive personal data and because of their very nature are legally required to implement high security standards.
High standards of authentication, access control, auditing and logging will be required. There is also a need to accept and exchange bulk data from other systems using the Becta endorsed SIFa standard.
Is this what we are talking about?
<quote>
There is also a need to accept and exchange bulk data from other systems using the Becta endorsed SIFa standard.
[/quote]
There is no statutory requirement for data exchange via SIF. The requirements are via a Common Transfer File, specified by DCSF.
I am working full time on ScholarPack to get it ready for release which should be before the unconference. It does all any school is required to do by government, is secured via roles based authentication and accessed through SSL.
I agree that SIF is not statutory, but Becta has seen fit to write to all local authorities in support of SIF. My understanding is that one of the uses of SIF is to get assessment and report data data ported into learning environments for realtime online reports to parents and carers. I think there is a possibility that without SIF compatibility the usefulness of an MIS system may be compromised.
Interestingly Capita are NOT following the SIF...
http://www.siriusit.co.uk/myblog/sif/index.php
Here is a comment from an Edugeek forum from a Capita employee:
<quote>
I can see why you think that we are sending out mixed messages by using a modified SIF in our partnership exchange. We are using a bastardised version of SIF as a data transport mechanism for a limited range of data between schools that share pupils. If the ZIS annual pupil charges remain as we have seen then we may indeed move away from SIF. Our implementation would not get a SIF approved tick. The IMS standard doesn’t include assessment or attendance data so it isn’t suitable.
We have at least 100 partners (who make profits) that link to SIMS via the run-time report generation or using Business Objects. This gives them full access to the data in SIMS and in the BO case they can write data back as well. SIF would not replace most of these partners needs because they want to get to the data that SIMS stores. Take for example document exchange, SIF doesn’t support it and even if it did broadcasting documents around the network would not be very efficient.
Interoperability is not easy. If SIF is funded it might just work but it will require massive changes in all MIS to make it happen. Then the question will be whether to take things to the lowest common denominator or not.
In my view small players will not be able to afford to produce SIF compliant systems.
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Capita have no commercial incentives to support SIF. BECTA are advisory and largely toothless, the DCSF will tell us what to do in conjunction with 'The Suppliers'. Don't get distracted by by non-core functions. The first need is a fully working MIS. As long as it conforms to CBDS these sorts of issues can be addressed later, if necessary, but I don't think SIF will ever be an issue. SIMS Capita will push for acces via their business objects for which they receive payment.