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Education

Student Administrative Software for Unix? 31

Posted by Cliff from the running-a-K-12-on-something-other-than-glass-panes dept.
MISplice asks: "I have been searching for a Linux alternative to SASIxp which is a student administrative databse for K-12 schools (it does grades, schdeuling, and holds demographic and medical data). I have found the OpenSIS project which seems to be on hiatus and never past the implementation stages. Does anyone know of such a product or project that is under development? If not does anyone know if these types of products will work under WINE?" Have there been any new developments in this area since this article from 2000?
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Student Administrative Software for Unix? More

Student Administrative Software for Unix?

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  • I don't know if anything exists now, but this is certainly something that could be developed or commissioned by a consortium of K-12 districts. Unlike higher education, K-12 doesn't have competition issues, so a cooperative project for a student administration system could displace closed-source software. The consortium could even generate revenue selling support, perhaps.

    • Re:Interesting concept (Score:3, Interesting)

      by lal ( 29527 )
      I have been working in higher ed (not K-12) application software for > 10 years. Every consortium for administrative software that I have experienced - and there have been several - have been colossal failures. Consortiums are the ultimate design by committee, and DBC is the worst way to design software.

      I'd love to see some open source limited market application software projects. There aren't many, for this reason: This type of application software needs domain experts and programmers. Ideally, if the domain expert is also a programmer, you'll get the best software. A talented programmer who is also a domain expert and wants to build open source software is a rare bird indeed. Add to that the immense commitment required for all but the simplest application programs, and you see why limited market application programs are not open source.
      • Thanks--I didn't realize there had already been efforts by consorita in this direction. But I didn't think DBC would be so bad, given that (from my non-K-12 administrator point of view) the needs should be very similar between districts.
    • What K12 needs is zero-administration. That means
      support staff and a recurring service charge.
      I tried to sell such a project (open source scheduling/
      grading) to the local public school service co-op,
      but they wouldn't fund it. I went to the Minnesota
      department of childhood families and learning, and
      they *loved* my demo and prototype, which included
      9 man-months of effort invested in collecting the
      local and state-wide graduation standards to allow
      students to see what they needed and how they were
      progressing towards graduation while they selected
      their classes, but they weren't interested in
      funding it either.


      Really, this is a gold-mine opportunity for an ASP
      start-up. I've got the experience and even a lot of
      the code and data to do it, but I don't have the bizdev acumen to make this fly. If you're an angel
      investor tired of dot-com flim-flam and want to
      do something that really helps people as well as
      making money hand-over-fist, give me a buzz.

      • hello, you touched on a subject that I am quite interested in, there are some players in the ASP market for this niche...i have a few ideas and a model about where we can go with this...funding is the big question...i'm in the phase of brainstorming and reseaching on rules, laws, and regulations - before I try to get funding...i would like to discuss with you some more...my email is lamgoo@yahoo.com if interested in discussing further and open to opportunites!
  • Check out Bessie the Annhilator [freshmeat.net]. It does a great job at grading even if it doesn't do the rest of what you asked. It's written in php and is very extensible.
  • Does Slahdot still use MySQL? I remember reading some MySQL gripes by Taco a WHILE back and some talk of NuSphere. Just curious.

  • Colleges (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Apreche ( 239272 )
    Check out colleges and see what they use. I go to RIT http://www.rit.edu we have SIS that students use to get all their info about schedules, grades, etc. And it also allows all the faculty to grade us. Just about every university has some sort of electronic SIS nowadays. Try e-mailing a few IT departments and ask them what they use.
    • SIS is poorly written, very clumsy to walk through and needs a complete rewrite. That, and a serious hardware upgrade for running it. 4 years of SIS is enough for me, I'm done in 5 days. WOO!
    • SIS is a hack of shit. Want to register for your classes? Forget it, system is full. Better off going to someone in the department with STARS access and getting them to register for you. That's what I did. Stupid ITS, they have their heads up their asses.
  • If you don't absolutely need open source, you could look into PowerSchool (http://www.apple.com/education/powerschool/). It's got scheduling, reports, transcripts, report cards, etc. Runs on Unix or Windows servers. I remember reading that the guy who used to head up Apple's OS 9.1 development moved over to the PowerSchool team.
    • I would be careful on this one and ask carefully about the development roadmap and release dates. I work with an organization that was heavily into planning a PS migration but the plug was pulled on the new release by Apple so we were back to square one.
  • In the amount of time it's taken you to research the project you probably could have built one.
    • In the amount of time it's taken you to research the project you probably could have built one.

      Obviously, you've never used a product like SASIxp, or worked in a K-12 school district for that matter. These are incredibly complex packages that handle everything from student records to financial records. In addition, they store the kind of information that allows state and federal mandated reports to be generated, and can generate those reports in the exact manner required.

      You're also assuming that the poster is a developer, or has such skills.
  • I think that a lot of people don't realize how comprehensive this product has to be to replace a piece of software as complex as SASIxp.

    If you can find several developers that understand what School Administrators need and enjoy hacking on this kind of software for free in their spare time, I would love to meet them. I would love to contribute to such a project but after following the OpenSIS devel lists for a while, it became inrcreasingly clear that the requirements are huge for such software. It requires people with a lot of intimate knowledge of state reporting requirements for each individual state, intelligent scheduling functions, information security, and still be simple to use.

    I dislike the pricing, support costs, and vendor lock, and bugs of SASIxp, but it really is not a trivial task to replace this software with an free software alternative.
    • SASIxp is pretty horrific. Can anyone tell me why it doesn't use a real database backend? It seems to be file-based, with file-locking (e.g., no central server except a file server). This just doesn't make any sense to me.
      • It can be configured to use MS SQL Server, but I haven't tried. I agree that file based access is poor design, and there are a lot of bugs in SASIxp. They have more services releases than most any software that I have seen. It's almost as if we are the beta testers or something.

        There is just so few alternatives for a comprehensive student management package. There doesn't exist a free software alternative, but as I and others have already mentioned, the incentive to create niche software of this kind as free software could only really be done by those with the knowledge of what schools need.
        • really? hot damn, if it can interface with MS SQL then MS Class server can work with it, now I know you all are a bunch of *nix / bsd / anything not MS, but our school district unfortunatly is not that way, and we have a district wide MS licence...got any info on MS SQL on SASI? I am really interested in getting MS CS and SASIxp working together.
  • For those of you not familiar with SASIxp or other Student systems it would be a monumental undertaking.. for instance.. SASIxp has been around since the early 80's in a DOS based version and has matured from there. It has over 175 different databases, not to mention that most major files(grading, demographics, courses.. which each section can have 10 + databases associated with them) have 30+ fields each (in DB4 most of which can be transfered to SQL with an executable they provide) and multiple sub routines that allow data to be transfered between school years at the click of a button. I personally have been working alone in trying to create a similar system Using an SQL database with PHP as the interface.. I know nothing about PHP and am still trying to think of all the tables and logical keys to link everything together. Everything I have is basically on paper and will stay that way until I can get the database design the way it should be... So for those that say build it yourself.. I am trying but it is a grave undertaking just to make sure you have the majority of the Fields needed by schools. I would gladly collaborate with others to restart something Similar to OpenSIS just to get a basic foundation I don't even care about reporting yet I would just like a nice Database with a friendly UI to get the data and print it 1 page at a tiem.. from there I can worry about reports.
  • A friend of mine owns a company that makes just such a beast..
    http://www.cotcomsol.com/byteworks2.sql

    I know nothing at it per se, except that it was written by a competant programmer.
  • I work for a large (75K students) school district in Ohio and am potentially looking to become a part of a coalition to develop an open source SIS. As several of the other posters have noted, this is not a small undertaking. However, we typically have resources that a number of smaller districts may not. I am interesed in promoting further discovery into how a coalition could build a robust SIS that could be shared by all. If anyone is interested, please mail me @ benderth@cmsdnet.net

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