8 ms·

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

76 points by japhyr 14y ago

bdunbar 14y ago
I 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.'
- d4vlx 14y ago
  True but I have a lot more faith in a tightly integrated 8 person team than some off the shelf bloat-ware customization project.
  - codygman 14y ago
    As Do I, it sounds like they are partially doing this to prove a point, which means they'll likely find a way to go through with it.
  - bdunbar 14y ago
    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'.
    - gferrie 14y ago
      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
      - bdunbar 14y ago
        Fascinating - thanks for the update.
ewams 14y ago
" 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.
- gferrie 14y ago
  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.
d4vlx 14y ago
$97 million for this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCeSIS 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.
sumukh1 14y ago
It 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 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ifusd/id454673943?mt=8 [2] GitHub: https://github.com/FremontUnified/ https://github.com/FremontUnified/
- zapt02 14y ago
  link?
japhyr 14y ago
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 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.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  "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 are plug-ins for Word that can produce quizzes, and most of the interactive white-board software packages (each dedicated to a make of interactive white-board) can import from Powerpoint or allow authoring of interactive content. What I as a teacher don't need is someone telling me to use some huge IDE like package to build my lessons! In the future I'd like to use a cheap tablet to scribe on and have what I'm scribing (or what I have prepared earlier) just appear on the projector and on the student tablets. I'd also like to be able to invite student A to 'show' something to everyone else. Then I'd like to be able to roll the whole lesson up and pop it somewhere like a Moodle course so the students can access the stuff later for revision. The original article addresses 'back end' student tracking and data capture type software. More of a business application.
  - japhyr 14y ago
    I was talking about a different project that I would like to see happen, but built using a similar development model. To be more specific, I'd like to see a dedicated curriculum development tool built. I;d like it to be high-quality and open source, so it can see widespread use in schools of every economic level. I am not envisioning a simple plugin to a word processing tool; I am imagining a dedicated curriculum development tool that manages things like importing standards, and connecting detailed parts of a learning plan to bigger-picture summaries. I in no way imagine such a tool being mandated for anyone; I simply imagine a tool that is powerful enough that people will see it used well by experienced teachers, and want to use it themselves.
jmj42 14y ago
I'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.
- japhyr 14y ago
  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 structure you'd want to use to address liability issues.
  - betterunix 14y ago
    Mandatory ACLs, built right into the database and integrated with the OS that the system runs on: https://code.google.com/p/sepgsql/ https://code.google.com/p/sepgsql/ Assuming, of course, that you have some good way to connect a user's login to the app (which is probably being delivered on the web in this day and age) with an SELinux role. Luckily, we can do that too: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=501228 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=501228
  - 2arrs2ells 14y ago
    While privacy issues are important, state compliance & reporting are actually the bigger challenge. These types of systems typically track enrollments and attendance, which get reported to the state and determine the district's funding. The calculations here can be fairly wonky (i.e. some states require schools to calculate every student's attendance down to the minute) and an error could have massive consequences. My suggestion for a project is rather than trying to replace the core database, use an API like Clever (https://getclever.com/developers/docs https://getclever.com/developers/docs) to build something cool on top of the existing database. (Disclaimer - I'm a co-founder of Clever).
Falling3 14y ago
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.
- betterunix 14y ago
  I think the "doubters" are just not used to seeing that sort of thing. They probably think the approach is going to look more like this: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/o/office_of_payroll_administration_nyc/citytime/index.html http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organiza... You know, the case where you hire a team of contractors to build something, and then that team totally screws up, goes years past the deadline, and charges you enormous amounts of money. Meanwhile, there are ready-to-ship products out there that can be bought for a yearly fee, which carry less risk but higher costs.
- mistermann 14y ago
  Agreed. I'd go further and say I would expect many here have successfully completed similarly complex projects single-handedly with a lot less time and money. As I grow older, I'm increasingly starting to believe that many of the advancements in sophistication of software are actually somehow making it much less possible to successfully implement relatively complex solutions on budget - I am making this comparison to the relatively short era where platforms like PowerBuilder/Delphi/MSAccess were popular. If you mention on of those products now for literally anything, you'll be met with howls of laughter, but for the life of me I don't understand. Meanwhile, spending $2 million on a project that is laughably short on functionality and seems to take weeks to make the smallest of changes is considered (with grave seriousness and 100% infallible confidence) to be perfectly proper.
- chiph 14y ago
  I think the keys are that they have a limited set of requirements, they're close to the users, they have low/reasonable expectations, and are willing to accept that the system will need updating & improving in the future. Sounds like a perfect fit for one of the agile methodologies.
- 14y ago
kozikow 14y ago
We have something like this for years in Poland and it works very well: http://usos.edu.pl/about-usos http://usos.edu.pl/about-usos
swedegeek 14y ago
For me, while it's absolutely no surprise, it's still quite depressing the clear lobbying that is/will occur to trample this project. As others have said, the cost seems quite realistic and I would put my money on the 8-person having a much better handle on the end-users needs over some big consulting-ware shop. But the big firms surely have great influence with those most able to appropriate the funds for whatever solution B.C. opts to implement. There's obviously maintenance, support, enhancement, etc. that must go on after initial launch, but that still should not get anywhere near the monster price from an outside vendor. I hope their fate is not so dire. I will definitely be interested in updates on the school district's efforts.
- donw 14y ago
  It's a little amazing, when you think about it, that a lot of people think you need to spend $100 million to build software to manage grades and attendance. Especially as geeks in the startup world often build far more complicated software on budgets quite a bit smaller than $5 million.
  - sopooneo 14y ago
    Even if all it did was grade and attendance. It is not trivial to get that right. My own little pet project http://gradezilla.com http://gradezilla.com took years of refinement before it could handle just those things. Tying in with other aspects of a schools system makes it many multiple more complicated.
    - donw 14y ago
      That's fair, but it's still not a $100 million investment.
LarryMade 14y ago
I've done similar when working for a non-profit. Having the tech guys on campus helps drive the development you get access to the people who work with the data as well as updates on requirements of what is needed (there's always something people will forget in a spec... until some report is due and they mention it.) They can also bring in staff to test components as they are being developed. My thing was child care related; student tracking is a whole new level, key things are relationships as in families, adults to children children to education, teachers to children to classes to teachers to credentials, etc. Plus whatever factors affect all that (social assistance qualifications, immunizations, gpas, etc.) Though once you get the core data figured out and organized (which is the major bit) the rest starts falling into place. It's not rocket science but it is a definitely a detailed data situation, which you need people dedicated to it for years to put it all together. As far as anything like that being "done" not in the public sector... you got everything going then some new law changes and you need to adjust tracking/claims based on some new factor or add in an adjusted reimbursement calculation etc. so you have to restructure some data add some new entry methods, new reports, etc. Easier on an open system than a closed system. Problem with "canned" software is it is usually developed out of one district with their own unique needs when it gets packaged as a one thing fits all it needs to be patched for other conditions and environments... It is usually geared for a specific administration staffing method, so buying something canned may mean you have to do administrative changes in order to work with the new system, etc. It's good work though, and a nice challenge to sort out all the data and get it collected, properly managed, and accessible to the right people.
christiangenco 14y ago
I can't even load the BCeSIS website through all of the Java security warnings: http://www.bcesis.isw-bc.ca/ http://www.bcesis.isw-bc.ca/
patcon 14y ago
Oh man, how awesome would it be if a high school CS class were able to have a lesson where they learn how to contribute to an open source project that their own school uses? So cool!
kabdib 14y ago
In the late 90s the San Francisco school district was sold a PeopleWare system, whereupon they paid consultants millions of dollars to customize the package. 'Twas a failure; they tossed it all away. I don't remember the details, though I was feeling their pain, having to deal with (a) the unbelievably horrid, steaming pile that is PeopleWare, and (b) the clouds of consultants that start calling you up and pumping you for money once it is out that you're doing an install of the pile. (Hint: You don't need any help from a high-price consultant to install PeopleWare. You need a can of gasoline and a match). So the thought of a school district doing this on their own makes me smile. They could do worse!
siliconc0w 14y ago
There is where the federal government I think can help and step in to provide a hosted open source education system (wit a local appliance for caching and to survive outages). Not just for student registration and grades, but US-wide shared lesson plans, shared success stories, realtime metrics and for parents, etc.
jasonpbecker 14y ago
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 point at someone else's assurances and contract that allows for recourse. 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. Now deal with changing technology (oh you want a parent portal? Oh, you don't want to use Flash/Java for iPads? Oh you want ...) and you really can't attract and retain the kind of software people you'd want to continually redesign, refactor, rebuild, extend, and expand. Development on these systems never stops, which is why it's often easier to just drop off the old and buy the new hotness. It's also why scale is so helpful with these systems. If your users want this, someone else already requested it or will shortly. A lot of the improvements in these systems happen because of how many users they have and can be made because the cost is spread across all those users. 3. Interoperability with other systems. Most of these systems are not omnibus catchall solutions for the entire business needs of a school district. That's probably for the better-- the folks who try to do that end up doing it very poorly. But you will want your HR and payroll to talk to your student information system that should probably talk to your assessment system that should talk to your curriculum management system that should talk to your special education IEP case load management system, etc. It's hard to do this and even harder when your solution is built to work in one context. Standards here have only barely helped. Middleware is expensive, shitty work. Again, not easy to attract killer talent and it is a constant need. The big boys have everything else built and just focus on middleware and have probably already worked with and written what's required for all of the popular systems you are using in these other areas. This is just the smallest fraction of reasons it's a huge PITA to write and maintain these systems. That's not to say that it can't be done but it is to say that this is not a small, well-defined problem space with just a few distinct end-user types and functional requirements that can be built once and then monitored and tweaked over time. Not if you want to do the real stuff that makes collecting and maintaining all of this data worthwhile.
jlc 14y ago
I wonder if they considered throwing their lot in with Schooltool: http://www.schooltool.org http://www.schooltool.org It has been around a long while now, is in use around the world, and should at least make a good starting point for further customization.
deleted 14y ago
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jarvuschris 14y ago
Technology and software in schools in one of the most corrupt, backwards, and destructive markets around. Schools must take charge of their own software and destiny with a robust open-source economy. The Science Leadership Academy, a public high school in Philadelphia, runs on an open source SIS we've developed for under $100K and it has been in production for over 3 years. We are working now build an alliance between several like schools to share the maintenence and development costs of supporting a public release. If this group is planning on spending $5 million, we're still dealing with enterprise salesman hiring amateur or out-of-date developers. Give me another $100K and I'll put money in hackers' pockets to build quality software and make sure no other schools _have_ to pay for the same thing twice. This is more of the same crap, there's a whole new generation of developers that don't have access to the school software market, and it's students that are losing out because of it. The developers that built all the sites and apps this community knows and loves wouldn't need anywhere near $5 million to build this SIS and it wouldn't look like it got left over from 1999
rayditutto 14y ago
it's open? where's the code?
- gferrie 14y ago
  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

76 points by japhyr 14y ago

I 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.'

d4vlx 14y ago
True but I have a lot more faith in a tightly integrated 8 person team than some off the shelf bloat-ware customization project.
- codygman 14y ago
  As Do I, it sounds like they are partially doing this to prove a point, which means they'll likely find a way to go through with it.
- bdunbar 14y ago
  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'.
  - gferrie 14y ago
    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
    - bdunbar 14y ago
      Fascinating - thanks for the update.

ewams 14y ago

" 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.

gferrie 14y ago
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.

d4vlx 14y ago

$97 million for this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCeSIS 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.

sumukh1 14y ago

It 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 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ifusd/id454673943?mt=8 [2] GitHub: https://github.com/FremontUnified/ https://github.com/FremontUnified/

zapt02 14y ago
link?

japhyr 14y ago

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 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.

keithpeter 14y ago
"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 are plug-ins for Word that can produce quizzes, and most of the interactive white-board software packages (each dedicated to a make of interactive white-board) can import from Powerpoint or allow authoring of interactive content. What I as a teacher don't need is someone telling me to use some huge IDE like package to build my lessons! In the future I'd like to use a cheap tablet to scribe on and have what I'm scribing (or what I have prepared earlier) just appear on the projector and on the student tablets. I'd also like to be able to invite student A to 'show' something to everyone else. Then I'd like to be able to roll the whole lesson up and pop it somewhere like a Moodle course so the students can access the stuff later for revision. The original article addresses 'back end' student tracking and data capture type software. More of a business application.
- japhyr 14y ago
  I was talking about a different project that I would like to see happen, but built using a similar development model. To be more specific, I'd like to see a dedicated curriculum development tool built. I;d like it to be high-quality and open source, so it can see widespread use in schools of every economic level. I am not envisioning a simple plugin to a word processing tool; I am imagining a dedicated curriculum development tool that manages things like importing standards, and connecting detailed parts of a learning plan to bigger-picture summaries. I in no way imagine such a tool being mandated for anyone; I simply imagine a tool that is powerful enough that people will see it used well by experienced teachers, and want to use it themselves.

jmj42 14y ago

I'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.

japhyr 14y ago
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 structure you'd want to use to address liability issues.
- betterunix 14y ago
  Mandatory ACLs, built right into the database and integrated with the OS that the system runs on: https://code.google.com/p/sepgsql/ https://code.google.com/p/sepgsql/ Assuming, of course, that you have some good way to connect a user's login to the app (which is probably being delivered on the web in this day and age) with an SELinux role. Luckily, we can do that too: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=501228 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=501228
- 2arrs2ells 14y ago
  While privacy issues are important, state compliance & reporting are actually the bigger challenge. These types of systems typically track enrollments and attendance, which get reported to the state and determine the district's funding. The calculations here can be fairly wonky (i.e. some states require schools to calculate every student's attendance down to the minute) and an error could have massive consequences. My suggestion for a project is rather than trying to replace the core database, use an API like Clever (https://getclever.com/developers/docs https://getclever.com/developers/docs) to build something cool on top of the existing database. (Disclaimer - I'm a co-founder of Clever).

Falling3 14y ago

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.

betterunix 14y ago
I think the "doubters" are just not used to seeing that sort of thing. They probably think the approach is going to look more like this: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/o/office_of_payroll_administration_nyc/citytime/index.html http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organiza... You know, the case where you hire a team of contractors to build something, and then that team totally screws up, goes years past the deadline, and charges you enormous amounts of money. Meanwhile, there are ready-to-ship products out there that can be bought for a yearly fee, which carry less risk but higher costs.
mistermann 14y ago
Agreed. I'd go further and say I would expect many here have successfully completed similarly complex projects single-handedly with a lot less time and money. As I grow older, I'm increasingly starting to believe that many of the advancements in sophistication of software are actually somehow making it much less possible to successfully implement relatively complex solutions on budget - I am making this comparison to the relatively short era where platforms like PowerBuilder/Delphi/MSAccess were popular. If you mention on of those products now for literally anything, you'll be met with howls of laughter, but for the life of me I don't understand. Meanwhile, spending $2 million on a project that is laughably short on functionality and seems to take weeks to make the smallest of changes is considered (with grave seriousness and 100% infallible confidence) to be perfectly proper.
chiph 14y ago
I think the keys are that they have a limited set of requirements, they're close to the users, they have low/reasonable expectations, and are willing to accept that the system will need updating & improving in the future. Sounds like a perfect fit for one of the agile methodologies.
14y ago

kozikow 14y ago

We have something like this for years in Poland and it works very well: http://usos.edu.pl/about-usos http://usos.edu.pl/about-usos

swedegeek 14y ago

For me, while it's absolutely no surprise, it's still quite depressing the clear lobbying that is/will occur to trample this project. As others have said, the cost seems quite realistic and I would put my money on the 8-person having a much better handle on the end-users needs over some big consulting-ware shop. But the big firms surely have great influence with those most able to appropriate the funds for whatever solution B.C. opts to implement. There's obviously maintenance, support, enhancement, etc. that must go on after initial launch, but that still should not get anywhere near the monster price from an outside vendor. I hope their fate is not so dire. I will definitely be interested in updates on the school district's efforts.

donw 14y ago
It's a little amazing, when you think about it, that a lot of people think you need to spend $100 million to build software to manage grades and attendance. Especially as geeks in the startup world often build far more complicated software on budgets quite a bit smaller than $5 million.
- sopooneo 14y ago
  Even if all it did was grade and attendance. It is not trivial to get that right. My own little pet project http://gradezilla.com http://gradezilla.com took years of refinement before it could handle just those things. Tying in with other aspects of a schools system makes it many multiple more complicated.
  - donw 14y ago
    That's fair, but it's still not a $100 million investment.

LarryMade 14y ago

I've done similar when working for a non-profit. Having the tech guys on campus helps drive the development you get access to the people who work with the data as well as updates on requirements of what is needed (there's always something people will forget in a spec... until some report is due and they mention it.) They can also bring in staff to test components as they are being developed. My thing was child care related; student tracking is a whole new level, key things are relationships as in families, adults to children children to education, teachers to children to classes to teachers to credentials, etc. Plus whatever factors affect all that (social assistance qualifications, immunizations, gpas, etc.) Though once you get the core data figured out and organized (which is the major bit) the rest starts falling into place. It's not rocket science but it is a definitely a detailed data situation, which you need people dedicated to it for years to put it all together. As far as anything like that being "done" not in the public sector... you got everything going then some new law changes and you need to adjust tracking/claims based on some new factor or add in an adjusted reimbursement calculation etc. so you have to restructure some data add some new entry methods, new reports, etc. Easier on an open system than a closed system. Problem with "canned" software is it is usually developed out of one district with their own unique needs when it gets packaged as a one thing fits all it needs to be patched for other conditions and environments... It is usually geared for a specific administration staffing method, so buying something canned may mean you have to do administrative changes in order to work with the new system, etc. It's good work though, and a nice challenge to sort out all the data and get it collected, properly managed, and accessible to the right people.

christiangenco 14y ago

I can't even load the BCeSIS website through all of the Java security warnings: http://www.bcesis.isw-bc.ca/ http://www.bcesis.isw-bc.ca/

patcon 14y ago

Oh man, how awesome would it be if a high school CS class were able to have a lesson where they learn how to contribute to an open source project that their own school uses? So cool!

kabdib 14y ago

In the late 90s the San Francisco school district was sold a PeopleWare system, whereupon they paid consultants millions of dollars to customize the package. 'Twas a failure; they tossed it all away. I don't remember the details, though I was feeling their pain, having to deal with (a) the unbelievably horrid, steaming pile that is PeopleWare, and (b) the clouds of consultants that start calling you up and pumping you for money once it is out that you're doing an install of the pile. (Hint: You don't need any help from a high-price consultant to install PeopleWare. You need a can of gasoline and a match). So the thought of a school district doing this on their own makes me smile. They could do worse!

siliconc0w 14y ago

There is where the federal government I think can help and step in to provide a hosted open source education system (wit a local appliance for caching and to survive outages). Not just for student registration and grades, but US-wide shared lesson plans, shared success stories, realtime metrics and for parents, etc.

jasonpbecker 14y ago

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 point at someone else's assurances and contract that allows for recourse. 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. Now deal with changing technology (oh you want a parent portal? Oh, you don't want to use Flash/Java for iPads? Oh you want ...) and you really can't attract and retain the kind of software people you'd want to continually redesign, refactor, rebuild, extend, and expand. Development on these systems never stops, which is why it's often easier to just drop off the old and buy the new hotness. It's also why scale is so helpful with these systems. If your users want this, someone else already requested it or will shortly. A lot of the improvements in these systems happen because of how many users they have and can be made because the cost is spread across all those users. 3. Interoperability with other systems. Most of these systems are not omnibus catchall solutions for the entire business needs of a school district. That's probably for the better-- the folks who try to do that end up doing it very poorly. But you will want your HR and payroll to talk to your student information system that should probably talk to your assessment system that should talk to your curriculum management system that should talk to your special education IEP case load management system, etc. It's hard to do this and even harder when your solution is built to work in one context. Standards here have only barely helped. Middleware is expensive, shitty work. Again, not easy to attract killer talent and it is a constant need. The big boys have everything else built and just focus on middleware and have probably already worked with and written what's required for all of the popular systems you are using in these other areas. This is just the smallest fraction of reasons it's a huge PITA to write and maintain these systems. That's not to say that it can't be done but it is to say that this is not a small, well-defined problem space with just a few distinct end-user types and functional requirements that can be built once and then monitored and tweaked over time. Not if you want to do the real stuff that makes collecting and maintaining all of this data worthwhile.

jlc 14y ago

I wonder if they considered throwing their lot in with Schooltool: http://www.schooltool.org http://www.schooltool.org It has been around a long while now, is in use around the world, and should at least make a good starting point for further customization.

deleted 14y ago

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jarvuschris 14y ago

Technology and software in schools in one of the most corrupt, backwards, and destructive markets around. Schools must take charge of their own software and destiny with a robust open-source economy. The Science Leadership Academy, a public high school in Philadelphia, runs on an open source SIS we've developed for under $100K and it has been in production for over 3 years. We are working now build an alliance between several like schools to share the maintenence and development costs of supporting a public release. If this group is planning on spending $5 million, we're still dealing with enterprise salesman hiring amateur or out-of-date developers. Give me another $100K and I'll put money in hackers' pockets to build quality software and make sure no other schools _have_ to pay for the same thing twice. This is more of the same crap, there's a whole new generation of developers that don't have access to the school software market, and it's students that are losing out because of it. The developers that built all the sites and apps this community knows and loves wouldn't need anywhere near $5 million to build this SIS and it wouldn't look like it got left over from 1999

rayditutto 14y ago

it's open? where's the code?

gferrie 14y ago
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