schooltoolers team mailing list archive

[Zhang Weiwu <zhangweiwu@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello. I am looking for student information system for our non-profit
training center.

The management in our training center is different from typical schools
for kids, thus I didn't have much of success when I try to adopt school
information system products, like OpenSIS. Looking at our highly dynamic
business model, it is obvious a general-purpose SIS product cannot be
used without customization, thus I am more looking at a good product
serving a base for customization than finding a product working out of
the box. We are also very tight on budget thus we accept workarounds and
hope to have to do only very limited modification, of course, provide
that data constance and correctness are well maintained.

I understand the management in our training center good enough to tell
if a product can be a good customization base by looking at the the
underlying data model (or database schema), as I did with OpenSIS. Since
SchoolTools is using object database, to which my RDBMS skill could not
apply, thus I guess I will have to ask in the list by explaining our
difference compare to a typical school. So here they are:


    Difference: we need teacher-lesson relationship

We have several times teachers to courses. A same course could be taught
by different teacher each lesson, and often decided only a few days
ahead of the lesson. Thus we need teacher-lesson relationship more than
teacher-section relationship. For example,

   1. clearly records about which teacher taught which lesson is
      important for our financial work flow.
   2. Teachers are supposed to fill a form of each lesson. In SchoolTool
      they could do so by editing calendar event description, but then
      it is inappropriately visible to students.

In case of OpenSIS there are no separate data table / object for each
lesson thus I can imagine unwanted radical changes are necessary in
order to adopt it.


    Difference: we need financial information


On our tight budget and with the highly dynamic society in Beijing we
often review training programs and change them, though stabilization
effort of which had been many years and might go on a few years, if ever
finishes. Thus we often need financial report by course and sometimes by
section. Even worse, discount is calculated so complicated that each
student might pay differently for the same section, thus in my
understanding each student-enrollment has to have its data table record
or object so that we can attach financial attributes to it. Integration
with prospective financial software is also a consideration (we have GNU
Cash in mind as I used it on other business a few years). Further, I can
generate different financial report with home-brew SQL statement, and is
worried if similar thing can be easily done with ZODB.


    Difference: students are customers

We offer training to adult individuals as well as to organizations, who
usually send their staff to us by groups. Thus our management is
interested in reports and analysis treating organization customers as a
whole, for example list customers by the revenue they contribute. As a
workaround, I might be able to borrow "parent / children" relationship
for "organizational customer / personnel" and use "contacts" as
"organizations". But again I am not very confident about the report I
can generate with it. I can do it in SQL context if contact is a table
related to student table but frown at ZODB, get more worried about its
flexibility on report generation than its learning curve.


    Difference: room management

We have two training facilities, in the western center and the eastern
center of Beijing, each with several rooms. The training courses are
highly dynamic, thus questions like "what rooms are available on Feb
24th" and "what time can we offer a room in western Beijing?" should be
answerable. How SchoolTool manage this I haven't dig deep enough.
However, OpenSIS, as I read its SQL tables, cannot offer this without
unwanted radical change to database schema.


    Difference: certificates instead of scores

This last difference is my least worry, because we do it much simpler
than schools. We grant our student hierarchical certificate for selected
courses but do not use scores. By hierarchical I mean a A level
certificates is above a B level certificate, and there isn't "math-A"
"physics-A", only single "A", since we only train one skill. This might
involve different use case than typical school. For example,

   1. The clerk might want to know the current level of a student. If he
      is granted B and A, his level should be A. He might even need a
      table of levels by students, if the system can easily provide one.
   2. Question "how many students are above B level" should be answerable.

These cases better be possible to satisfy without radical customization
on existing framework.


In the end, I don't expect all differences can be solved easily, but
even partial information of how difficult they are to be solved, might
be of great help to me, so please drop a few lines of what you know.

I'd like to thank you all in advance.

Zhang Weiwu