Re: [seul-edu] Re: Gradebook project

["David Frankson" <dfrankson@qwest.net>]

> if a student information system is created, it will likely be by
> accident--this has worked well for projects like apache.org.
> loosely coupled projects that seize opportunities to integrate and
> try to avoid doing anything that might discourage the opportunity.

You're developing a student system as an add-on to a gradebook?  As someone
who has developed a gradebook, and a student system, I don't think you are
fully understanding the scope of what you're proposing.

The most difficult part of designing a student system is the scheduler.
This is the tool that places all the sections of the courses into the school
calendar structure and handles the allocation of rooms and teachers, then
handles request-loading where the program tries to fulfill the optimal
number student course requests.  This is a combinatorial optimization
problem - given the nearly infinite permutations of teachers, rooms, and
section placements find the optimal schedule that meets the maximum number
of student requests while optimizing the resource allocation of the school.
You can judge the capabilities of any student system by the tool and
algorithm they use to solve this challenge.  A small 5% improvement in
schedule efficiency can mean huge savings to the school and smaller class
sizes.

OK, that being said,

1.)  The data structure of your gradebook should be designed for the
scheduler.  You need to build the course,section,teacher,student,schedule
structure to support the variations of term, period, A/B days, period
rotations, etc...  Its best to design the system focusing on the
big-picture, rather than the data structures that make implementing a
gradebook easiest.

2.)  Rather than developing your own SIS, why not combine your efforts with
an open source SIS such as OpenSIS http://opensis.org/

3.)  Instead of developing a SIS why not focus on the gradebook, define file
input/output formats, and develop a SIF client http://www.sifinfo.org/ for
automated transfer.


Dave