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School district builds own software to handle student data, defies doubters

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Re: School district builds own software to handle student data, defies doubters

#51

Post by mgkimsal »

jmj42 wrote: post #43
japhyr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the big obstacles I see with this kind of model is the need to get security rock-solid. Any system that deals with student information is subject to federal privacy laws, and the consequences of a data leak would be pretty significant. Any thoughts on how to deal with this? I am wondering if os projects like the one you describe could partner with an experienced mentor, but I still wonder what kind of structur…

See below. The accounting problem is a far greater challenge that security. Interestingly school information systems are notoriously bad at security, so hitting par won't actually be that hard. Accurate accounting may be a huge challenge, though. Either way, mentoring would be key, and no system developed vy students should be allowed into production at a scholl without a complete review. But that that's part of the…

assuming that the majority of the work at commercial company X is done by people who weren't long-ago HS students themselves, often with minimal training and support at their company, I agree, there's likely very little difference, other than the mistakes will be more open and easier for people to see and fix.

Re: School district builds own software to handle student data, defies doubters

#52

Post by mgkimsal »

jasonpbecker wrote: post #27

I'm pretty familiar with this problem space having worked in both a state department of education and a school district. I would not expect this to be a long term success. Virtually every district of reasonable size starts with a homegrown and maintained solution and ends up going with one of the big guys for lots of reasons. 1. Security/liability. You have to have pretty damn good systems here and definitely want to…

Adding some extra on to my previous reply.

"2. Rapidly changing business requirements. This is everything from state and federal reporting requirements to the expectations of end users. It's hard enough to maintain these core systems and keep folks around who are good enough to do it".

In mid 2011 our state passed some new laws as to how funding would be applied for virtual school enrollments across the state. We had a model in place, then code rolled out, within a few weeks - we had one bug that reared its head a few months later that was patched in a day and it's been fine since.

I'm not convinced the 'commercial player' that's taking everything over even understand the concept of our funding model, much less will be able to reliably integrate it with their existing systems, in the next 6 months. That's after handing over the code (with some, but certainly nowhere near complete, tests).

They may still pull it off, but I've yet to see them react quickly to 'changing business requirements'.

Re: School district builds own software to handle student data, defies doubters

#53

Post by gferrie »

ewams wrote: post #3

" By taking a not-for-profit approach and using freely available open-source tools, Saanich officials expect to develop openStudent for under $5 million, with yearly maintenance pegged at less than $1 million." They estimate that using their old software would cost $100mm over ten years. They're reducing that to roughly $15-20mm. Government software is lovingly expensive. The state I live in spent over $30mm to rebui…

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.

Re: School district builds own software to handle student data, defies doubters

#54

Post by gferrie »

rayditutto wrote: post #47

it's open? where's the code?

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.

gregg

Re: School district builds own software to handle student data, defies doubters

#55

Post by gferrie »

jasonpbecker wrote: post #27

I'm pretty familiar with this problem space having worked in both a state department of education and a school district. I would not expect this to be a long term success. Virtually every district of reasonable size starts with a homegrown and maintained solution and ends up going with one of the big guys for lots of reasons. 1. Security/liability. You have to have pretty damn good systems here and definitely want to…

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.

cheers

gregg

Re: School district builds own software to handle student data, defies doubters

#56

Post by gferrie »

2arrs2ells wrote: post #34
jasonpbecker wrote: post #27

I'm pretty familiar with this problem space having worked in both a state department of education and a school district. I would not expect this to be a long term success. Virtually every district of reasonable size starts with a homegrown and maintained solution and ends up going with one of the big guys for lots of reasons. 1. Security/liability. You have to have pretty damn good systems here and definitely want to…

While all three of your points are excellent concerns, I think you may be giving off-the-shelf systems a little too much credit. The SIS systems I know (US, K-12) do a mediocre job of updating quickly to new technologies/requirements (#2) and do a terrible job of interoperating with other systems through APIs (#3).

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.

gregg

Re: School district builds own software to handle student data, defies doubters

#57

Post by gferrie »

Falling3 wrote: post #10

1.5 million, close to 2 years and a "small band" of programmers to deliver a specialized product working on-site with the end users. Call me naive, but this sounds completely reasonable to me.

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.

hope that helps a bit.

Re: School district builds own software to handle student data, defies doubters

#58

Post by gferrie »

bdunbar wrote: post #46
d4vlx wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but I have a lot more faith in a tightly integrated 8 person team than some off the shelf bloat-ware customization project.

As would I. I don't assume they _are_ tightly integrated - all the article claims is 'eight people'. These could be crack coders. Or they could be '1 guy who kinda knows VB and 7 people learning OJT'.

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.

gregg

Re: School district builds own software to handle student data, defies doubters

#59

Post by gferrie »

japhyr wrote: post #8

I am watching this project pretty closely, because I believe pretty strongly that there is much room in education for some high-quality os software. I also believe this software has the potential to facilitate some pretty significant change in public education. I really want to see some high-quality os solutions become prominent in the education world. The software development world has had numerous os tools for deca…

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.

gregg

Re: School district builds own software to handle student data, defies doubters

#60

Post by bdunbar »

gferrie wrote: post #58
bdunbar wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As would I. I don't assume they _are_ tightly integrated - all the article claims is 'eight people'. These could be crack coders. Or they could be '1 guy who kinda knows VB and 7 people learning OJT'.

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. gregg

Fascinating - thanks for the update.
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