GPL software for school management. Any experience willing to share?

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I had a bit strange request: a small singing school is looking fore something better than shared calendar for studend, teachers, rooms and lessons management. With reservation and some more other thinks like performance analisys.

This few names could be a … little start.

Moodle

More a learning platform than a student information system but has a lot o plugins.
Pros
Fast transition to eLearning platorm
Quite quell known, “old” and solid
Cons
IDK if there’s enough solid and updated plugins for rooms, teachers and scheduling management, also result tracking and performance analysys

OpenSIS

A real Student Information System, with School Management System and Education Management Information System.
Pros
Seems to check all the boxes, except (seems to me) the possibile future eLearning extension
Quite lot options available
Cons
USA based project (less interest into l18n and i10n)
IDK if there’s Italian available (mandatory)
Seems more an open source “invitation” for payed enhancement and plugins
Analytics seems to me more part of payed version than the community one.
MySQL as DB engine.

Any info, experience, idea is valuable to me, even in other softwares not here listed.

Opensource and GDPR currently are mandatory, Italian is for the partner but… who knows… maybe could be the opportunity to get translation to a still not-translated project…

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No experience at all, but some time ago some users gave a shot at Gibbon. There’s also OpenEMIS for schools (and related products). But haven’t checked if they tick all the boxes.

Sometimes something interesting can be digged up from:

Maybe it will be worth to summon the @education_team for ideas.

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I had some experience with this… its cool.

Oh, i didnt read it well, you need something else… sorry Canvas is not what you are looking for, maybe a little better than moodle in some aspects.

To manage my school (i had a school for 4 years) i used: https://www.sponte.com.br/ and was quite happy with it

I guess they are not OpenSource and no italian :stuck_out_tongue:

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But they are experiences. And who knows, maybe some may be candidate not only for evaluation…

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what kind of perfomance analysis are they looking for?

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Canvas is easy to change and custom build it for school needs… i did it, and i am not even by far a very good developer! :stuck_out_tongue:

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Teacher evaluation by students result, hour-to-result ratio for achieving some kind of “degree” from the school, double blind comparing for different approach to the subject…

75% of the time won’t be useful or necessary, but if you don’t keep any kind of data and tools for analisys, you won’t get even the 25% of the occasions…
(Moreover, BI is kinda one of the skills of the partner…)

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We have an analysis software, but it’s mostly based for Kenya curriculum and is desktop system.
For them being a music school, I believe a custom software solution would be needed.

Now on the student records what do they or would they require to be captured and presented.
Or is it a normal school with. Music available.

Overall my thinking is a custom solution might need to be built.

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IMO Gibbon should be the primary target for a school management system. Unfortunately Gibbon does not support AD/LDAP. And IMO that is a big issue since a school should have a cetral accounting system where applications can check the credentials of a user.
In the past I have had contact with the main dev of Gibbon. Back then, he stated he couldn’t get AD/LDAP authentication implemented.
I don’t know the current status of this, but the dev(s) are quite responsive to questions and remarks. Maybe a time to re-investigate? Or would LemonLDAP be an option to use?
https://ask.gibbonedu.org/discussion/comment/7751#Comment_7751 looks promising.

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If you want learning analysis you should have a look at Xerte online Toolkits. If you create your learning objects in Xerte and point Moodle to that Xerte object, Xerte will analyse the use of that object. Students will make their assignments from Moodle.
Think of time spent on an object per user, per group/class, time spent on a individual question/task in an object per user and per group/class
Amount of re-takes. It’s really extensive data analysis and it will give insights in the use of the platform and the progress of individual students or groups of students.

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You called “the monkey”, gotta give credit with someone who already played with the ape…

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From what I see in that topic, not right now. LLNG would be the (or “a”) SSO solution that Gibbon would integrate with, as long as Gibbon supported at least one of OpenID Connect, SAML2, CAS, or header-based Apache authentication. It seems pretty explicit from the link you gave that it doesn’t support the first three, but the fourth may be an option AFAIK.

Edit: but to clarify–LLNG wouldn’t be something that would be written into Gibbon–it wouldn’t be a way that Gibbon could incorporate SSO. LLNG would rather be an SSO solution that Gibbon could integrate with, hopefully using one or more standard SSO protocols rather than Apache authentication.

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Xerte looks fantastic… thanks for that.

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I am quite involved in the xerte community. If you need any additional info, please do drop a line.

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I just thought of this again after reading the wishlist for NS8 containers. In this light I went over to the Gibbon website again and learned that MS AAD authentication has been added. :: Gibbon Docs

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