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
#2I hate to be Donald Downer but ... it's not done, yet.
' close to finishing the core version '
'expects to begin testing its openStudent software in elementary schools this spring, with a full launch to follow in 2014. An advanced version for middle and high schools is slated to roll out in 2015.'
Re: School district builds own software to handle student data, defies doubters
#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 rebuild a purchasing application. And it doesn't even work!
Go figure.
Re: School district builds own software to handle student data, defies doubters
#4$97 million for this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCeSIS. The BC government was milked. A system for a few thousand school administrators costing that much and could not handle the load? The ineptitude boggles my mind.
Awesome to see there are some smart people out there fighting back.
Re: School district builds own software to handle student data, defies doubters
#5I hate to be Donald Downer but ... it's not done, yet. ' close to finishing the core version ' 'expects to begin testing its openStudent software in elementary schools this spring, with a full launch to follow in 2014. An advanced version for middle and high schools is slated to roll out in 2015.'
True but I have a lot more faith in a tightly integrated 8 person team than some off the shelf bloat-ware customization project.
Re: School district builds own software to handle student data, defies doubters
#6It is totally possible for school districts to develop their own software. I helped launch a similar project to create a mobile app for my school district when I was in high school. Quotes from ed-tech companies were much more expensive than our costs. We also made it open source so that other school districts could use it.
Edit: Links
[1] App (now also on Google Play): https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ifusd/id454673943?mt=8
[2] GitHub: https://github.com/FremontUnified/
Re: School district builds own software to handle student data, defies doubters
#7It is totally possible for school districts to develop their own software. I helped launch a similar project to create a mobile app for my school district when I was in high school. Quotes from ed-tech companies were much more expensive than our costs. We also made it open source so that other school districts could use it. Edit: Links [1] App (now also on Google Play): https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ifusd/id4546739…
link?
Re: School district builds own software to handle student data, defies doubters
#8I 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 decades: vim, emacs, apache, to name just a few. I can't think of anything equivalent in education. Most teachers are still writing their lesson plans in Word or its equivalent, which is like writing your code in notepad without any coding-specific extensions.
There is lots of room to improve ed tech, and some of these improvements need to be open source to have any meaningful widespread impact.
Re: School district builds own software to handle student data, defies doubters
#9I've actually thought of proposing such a project for our school district. I'm not sure what we pay our current software, bu my thought was to develop a summer STEM program and give HS students the opportunity to participate is a real project with real consequences, etc.
Many of the school people (administrators/teachers) were very unhappy with the previous system, so I expected it to be a reasonably easy sale. Unfortunately I didn't have the necessary free time to pursue it much further than "thought experiment." Since, the school district has purchased a new system that school officials actually like.
That said, our school district (like most in Illinois) is facing some serious budget crunch due to the state failing to make payment on time (or at all), so maybe it's time to dial up this project again, and pitch it to the school board.
Re: School district builds own software to handle student data, defies doubters
#101.5 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.