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Re: can SchoolTools be used in my training center?

 

Hi Zhang Weiwu,

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 5:56 AM, Zhang Weiwu <zhangweiwu@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello. I am looking for student information system for our non-profit
> training center.

>    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.

I suspect that the easiest way to do this would be to modify the
attendance module to optionally also track teacher attendance.  In
particular, it already had the capacity to store private lesson
descriptions.  If I recall correctly, we just removed that from the
interface (but not the data model) because when we merged it and the
gradebook into the standard distribution of SchoolTool, it was
redundant.  But it could probably be turned back on (as an option)
fairly easily.

>    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.

We don't handle financial information at all right now.

>    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.

I would say learning curve is the issue.  Flexibility is not a problem
as long as you understand the structure of the object database and can
write the necessary Python scripts.

>    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.

SchoolTool is pretty good right now at  "what rooms are available on
Feb 24th" less so at more complex queries like "what time can we offer
a room in western Beijing?"

>    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.

Could these implemented as groups?

Hope this helps.

--Tom



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