Slashdot Mirror
Real Open Source Applications for Education?
openeducation writes "I have been researching open source solutions for K-12 education pretty heavily for the past year and have been disappointed to find no real alternatives to the large administrative applications like student information systems, data warehouse, ERP, etc. But recently, I ran across Open Solutions for Education. This group appears to be making a serious effort at creating a stack of open source applications that are alternatives to the large and costly commercial packages. Centre, an open source student information system that has been around for a while, is part of the solution stack. They have a data warehouse and are proposing an open source SIF alternative and an assessment solution. While the proof is in the pudding, these guys have working demos and they look pretty good for a first run. K-12 education is in dire financial straits and solutions like these could help with lower TCO. Plus, education is a collaborative industry already, which makes it a good fit for open source."
The TCO benefits of open-source are obvious, but only if wielded by the right hands, TANSTAFL!
1) Define better what you want to accomplish. (Objective, benefits, expectations)
2) Define better your resources. (Budget, Team, Time)
3) Define better your school. (Size, budget, number of students, teachers)
4) Draft a one-page document with this information, roll it up and use it to play whack-a-mole with local bean-counters.
5) Come back for more.
The openness of your source should be the least of your worries.
My last uni had a local book exchange site for students and I absolutely loved it! I think every school should have one but I'm not going to hold my breath since schools themselves profit from this scam.
Here's a link to the software: http://bookexchange.sourceforge.net/
Google Documents and Spreadsheets
Also, File->Track Changes
I took a distance learning Comp 2 class this semester that I wound up dropping, and the teacher used the track changes feature to write comments in.
All that said, yes, I wholeheartedly agree there needs to be a way to annotate documents. Why are we here in 2007 with a billion years of word processing behind us and we still can't annotate documents in a word processor?
Like what I said? You might like my music
I am a Sys Admin for a midsize K12 school district. It is a legal requisite that we gather this information to get money to pay for staff. We can't arbitrarily ask for money and have no accountability for having or not having students. There are also expectations for performance. There is trending an analysis for growth and development of projects. Mind you, tens of thousands of children have to be kept track of. What if one doesn't show up for a class? During that time period the kid could be sick in the restroom, ditching school, kidnapped, not properly recorded or dead. Quite a panorama of possibilities all of which has happened at my school district. Just an efficient attendance system (which is part of a SIS) can maybe give us time to notify police, family or whomever. Saving kids from peanut butter is a somewhat common use of the SIS. Staff for information collection and management hasen't grown significantly in the last 15 years but the amount of students and data handled is a whole magnitude higher. Now if only we had a DBA or at least someone who understood what normalization was, ah well thats another story.
Doesn't everybody think WebCT sucks? It is such a pain to use. Sort a field, but then select a student, and when you come back its unsorted again. And whats with viewing 23 students in the grade book as default? Make it say all, but then you go to do something with it, and it reverts back...
I work for a small K-12 district in British Colombia, Canada. We use Linux for all of our servers (natch), and we have either created in-house, or modified slightly, pretty much everything we need. We do all of our user account admin through one system that takes care of email accounts, proxy accounts, samba directories, groups management, and so on. We have also made our own systems for proxy control (teachers can create their own groups of students or computers on the fly and allow or deny network privileges as needed); we run a multi-user install of Word press that gives every account holder their own blog(s); and we are in the process of rolling out a Moodle install that will be a large gear in our distance learning machine. There's probably more (oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention Koha, the library software), but I'm not the programmer! As for student information systems, we didn't have to make our own because our province has gone with a "universal" solution (AAL's Electronic Student Information System), which actually sucks quite bad. Really bad. But we didn't have a lot of choice in that matter, really. Hopefully the manufacturer can fix it so it works like a real application should. Feel free to contact me if you're interested in any of that stuff (we give it away, too!), at my throwaway email address: k12oss@worldsbiggestliar.com
"Apparatus dignosco occultus, satis non supernus."
Like hell it is. Educational expenditures have never been higher, even on a per-capita basis. We spend more on education than almost any other country, and get less for our money than almost any other country.
What's more, the school districts that spend the most, like the District of Columbia, tend to be the shittiest at actually educating their inmates.
This country needs to spend less, not more, on our schools.
We need to get rid of bloated administrative overhead.
We need to increase class size, get rid of computers and other distracting frippery in the classroom, and jettison all attempts at building "self-esteem" among little delinquents who don't deserve a particle of it. Let them earn self-respect on their own, through hard work with plenty of drills and rote memorization.
We need to bring back paddling, dunce caps, and shame.
We need to abandon "mainstreaming". Students with severe behavioral problems are causing terrible disruption of classes. They belong in segregated classes and schools. Tough shit for them, but they can't be permitted to ruin the whole educational experience for everyone else. No more social promotions, either. Either pass the requirements, repeat the year, or get the fuck on with your life of digging ditches.
We need to break up the cartel that controls education. Someone with a degree in math or business is far more qualified than the dregs and losers and nitwits that the typical College of Education churns out. He shouldn't have to sit through months of educrat babble and bilge in order to teach in a school. Teacher licensing is nothing more than rent-seeking and featherbedding and guild-gilding. Tenure should be totally abolished. Vouchers should be implemented nationwide. Worthless teachers and administrators should be hounded out of the profession. Worthless schools should be boarded up.
Most of all, we have to CRUSH the teacher's unions. These lazy, stupid, greedy lard asses put the education of our kids about tenth on their list of priorities, far behind fattening their bloated salaries, gold-plating their lavish pensions, padding the length of their 3-month summer vacations, salting the calendar with "inservice" junkets, diverting public money to shiftless in-laws and mobbed-up vendors and left-wing non-profits, and working the phone banks for whichever Democrat makes the most promises to shovel even more taxpayers' money onto the gravy train.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.