Interesting to see the recent protests around education budget cuts in California. The CA budget cuts are part of a broader nationwide trend to further cut education budgets. It appears that the federal government will eliminate the Enhancing Education through Technology (EETF) program removing another $100MM from education budgets that could be used to fund useful technologies in schools. For schools and districts, this will mean further budget cuts often times translating into school closures and teacher layoffs.

What is troubling is that schools and districts continue to use proprietary software solutions that are very expensive, incur repetitive upgrade cycles and that are based on other proprietary software platforms. I have written before on how the cost of open source solutions, yes there is a cost when done correctly, and how this cost often times can be more than 50% less to comparable commercial solutions. Today, there are so many well established open source options to student management systems, options to learning management systems and even options to assessment systems that it is puzzling why more schools and districts are not considering using these systems. With TCO and annual costs well below 50%, it seems like there would be more of a move to these open source alternatives. Considering recent integration efforts, it just seems that there should be more consideration given to these alternatives.

Given that education is a community unto itself, it seems to fit perfectly into the open source community model. Imagine the synergy and cost savings that could result if schools and districts banded ideas and resources together in partnership with open source providers. Over time this would have the potential to return significant budget outlays to the classroom. And the classroom is where students learn and that is where the budgetary focus should be in all schools.

Have you considered open source in education? If not, try it out. Most of the mature education offerings have fully functional demos and you can download and try the solutions for free. I think you will find that these open source vendors have much to offer.

Who is Engrade Anyway?

Recently, I heard a story about a school that wanted to use openSIS for their grade book. And why not? The openSIS solution has a really good grade book in addition to all of the other great features found in the solution. But instead, they chose to use an online solution called Engrade. That's OK, people choose different solutions for different reasons, but I thought I would check out Engrade myself so over to their website I went.

The site has an About link and here is what it says:

"Engrade, based in San Diego, California, was founded in 2003 by a great team of successful internet entrepreneurs who wanted to use their talents to help the world. Over the years, Engrade has grown by leaps and bounds, being adopted by teachers and schools in all 50 states and in countries across the world. Today Engrade has more than 1,500,000 members. We're very proud to do our part to help educators improve the lives of students around the world.

Our service is truly free and will remain free. We are able to offer Engrade free of charge because we have been fortunate in past businesses, allowing us to volunteer our talents and to pay for expenses out of our own pockets. In the future we may add optional premium services (for example, a service to send student transcripts to colleges) to help pay for costs, but we'll always keep the main features free.

Many teachers ask us if their information will stay private and secure on our service, and we can assure you that it will. We take our users privacy very seriously. Take a look at our privacy and security help pages below."

These guys were really fortunate to provide this great service for free forever. Right..... No such thing as a free lunch right? So I did take a look below at the links, the Terms of Service first because that is where it always gets interesting and the rubber meets the road so to speak. Now we begin to find out what Engrade really is promising and guaranteeing you. Here are some nice excerpts:

"7. Your use of the Services is at your sole risk and the Services are provided "as is" and as available. Engrade disclaims all warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including, but not limited to the implied warranties and conditions of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. Engrade does not represent or warrant that the Services will meet your requirements or that the Services will be uninterrupted, timely, or free from error."

Well, free is free and you can't expect it to be available at a 99.99% SLA right?

You will really like this next section:

"8. You understand and agree that Engrade, its owners, subsidiaries, directors, employees, attorneys, affiliates, and licensors will not be liable to you for:

8.a. any direct, indirect, incidental, special consequential or exemplary damages which may be incurred by you, however caused and under any theory of liability. This shall include but not be limited to any loss of profit (whether incurred directly or indirectly), any loss of goodwill or reputation, any loss of data, cost to procure of substitute goods or services, or other intangible loss;

8.b. any loss or damage that may be incurred by you as a result of: any changes that Engrade may make to the Services; any permanent or temporary cessation in the provision of the Services or any features of the Services); the deletion of, corruption of, or failure to store, any content and other communications data maintained or transmitted by or through your use of the Services; or your failure to keep your password or account details secure and confidential."

So in addition to no guarantees on the guaranteed free forever service, now there are no guarantees on your data, your goodwill and all the time you invested building your grade books and entering your data. they can shut down tomorrow and you have NO RECOURSE.

I love this one too:


10. Engrade reserves the right to stop providing the Services to you at any time for any reason without prior notice.

The great fortunate Internet entrepreneurs who promised you this free service forever are reserving the right to pull the plug without even telling you before they do. Seems to contradict all their other grand talk about sharing the fortune with you doesn't it?

How about their FERPA compliance?

All student data on Engrade is stored privately and securely on our servers. Engrade will never release any student data to any third parties. Engrade complies with paragraph (b)(1)(F) of the US Family Educational Right to Privacy Act (FERPA), allowing schools to share data with:

organizations conducting studies for, or on behalf of, educational agencies or institutions for the purpose of developing, validating, or administering predictive tests, administering student aid programs, and improving instruction, if such studies are conducted in such a manner as will not permit the personal identification of students and their parents by persons other than representatives of such organizations and such information will be destroyed when no longer needed for the purpose for which it is conducted;

Engrade is probably using you and your data for research, probably to serve up ads to pay for this service they are providing to you free forever because they were so fortunate.

Does it seem strange at all that you cannot find any information on who is behind Engrade? WhoIs their domain name and you get no information. There is no usable information on their web site and support is simply a wiki of help information. No Contact Us links, no About Us links, only a free forever service whose terms of service say they do not have to provide it free forever.

Who are these guys and should you trust your data to them? Not me. Sometimes free is not so good.

openSIS 4.8 Released

Just wanted to pass along that Open Solutions for Education (OS4Ed) has just announced the release of openSIS 4.8. This keeps in line with their goal of quarterly product updates. Here are some notes on the release from the website:

New Features

• Secondary teacher added to course periods. Now you can have a substitute teacher perform all functions of the main teacher.
• School, Subject and Course Period filtration has been added to Teacher login. Now it will be easier for a teacher who is teaching. several classes in to be able to find the right class.
• Improved pagination has been added. Now you can select a few students in one page, skip to another page and select some. more students and both you selections will be there.
• Student name will now take apostrophe.
• Teachers can now access the course manager.
• Pagination has been added to User list and also "back to list" function.
• System preference settings created to manage preferences.
• Ability to put openSIS in maintenance mode.
• Student advanced search options added.
• Several security features and validations added.

Defects Fixed

• Visible Between dates are auto initialize in new portal notes if we do not set Visible Between date.
• All field of new Add User were filled with '1'.
• Students showing up as inactive when their status is shown but also displayed in an active student list.
• Course Creation with blank spaces in title accepted the creation of course.
• Attendance report showed all schools.
• Student Info record print did not show dates from medical records.

openSIS continues to flourish and thrive and is a serious contender to replace existing proprietary SIS solutions from commercial vendors. OS4Ed offers a cloud-based version that can be setup in a matter of minutes. Take some time and check out the openSIS solution at http://opensis.com.

openSIS Preps for Release of Moodle Integration

Last week, I previewed the final beta of the openSIS Moodle integration and my first reaction was "Wow, that is really cool!" I have seen some other SIS systems integration, which typically amounts to an automated user login and then the display of the Moodle application, typically in an iFrame.  To me, this does not really represent integration, which I define as a robust exchange of data and functionality between two different applications.  So what does "integration" really mean for openSIS and Moodle?  Let's review:

openSIS ==> Moodle

• User Integration - When you create new users, teachers, staff, etc., in openSIS, these users are automatically created inside of Moodle.
• Students Integration - When you create new students, they are automatically created inside of Moodle.
• Courses - Courses created in openSIS are automatically created in Moodle.
• Course Periods/Sections - Like courses, individual course period/sections and the enrolled students are all automatically created in Moodle.

Moodle ==> openSIS

• Assignments - Once created inside of Moodle, assignments are created in openSIS grade book
• Quizzes - Just like assignments, quizzes are automatically created in the openSIS grade book
• Tests - Just like assignments and quizzes, tests are automatically created in the openSIS grade book
• Grades - Grades given in Moodle automatically transfer to the openSIS grade book for the given assignment.  

Other benefits include the ability to:

• manually create users and students in Moodle,
• include Moodle grades in final grade calculations or 
• exclude Moodle grades from final grade calculations.

It is really amazing to see it happen in real time and know that openSIS is the only SIS company that has truly integrated with Moodle providing bi-directional data exchange and deep functionality truly making it easy to deploy and effectively use Moodle in conjunction with openSIS.  The integration has a key benefit of making the teacher's tasks easier and less time-consuming enabling them to spend more time doing the important things, teaching that is.

Are you a Moodle hosting client?  This next piece will be interesting to you.  Final testing is being done now to ensure performance across a wide area network with integrated versions of openSIS and Moodle.  What does this mean for you as a Moodle hosted customer?  You can install and use openSIS locally while integrating to a remote hosted Moodle instance.  How much easier can it get?

openSIS is on the move and continues to add functionality further enhancing the solution and offering real usability for a very low cost.  It has been exciting to watch the growth of this dream and even more exciting to think of what the future holds for openSIS and OS4Ed.  Stay tuned to the openSIS website as we release some videos in the next couple of weeks showing it in action.

openSIS on the Move

openSIS has just deployed it's first 1 click state reporting module here in the US. One state down and three to go for this school year. Now users in the state of New Hampshire can, with only one click, generate all of the required CSV files for state reporting. This is really exciting news for this open source SIS solution that just keeps getting better and better.

Other development news includes the scheduled release of a beta Moodle integration by Thanksgiving 2010. Bob Ghosh, OS4Ed co-founder, is personally overseeing the development and is confident the final integration will be released in January 2011. Schools and districts entering their budget cycles for the next school year should have time to download and evaluate the openSIS solution to determine if it fits their needs and can be a replacement for more costly solutions.

openSIS is growing recently signing a Vermont school district, St Vincents and Grenadines and multiple other independent schools and colleges. Many of these clients are using the new cloud offering where clients can purchase a hosted solution online and have a production instance deployed for use in minutes.

Congratualtions to the community of clients and the hard work by the folks at OS4Ed for making all of this a reality and a great product. Cheers!

openSIS #2 on Eduforge

Check us out and help make us #1! https://eduforge.org/project/stats/?group_id=298 With version 4.6 we continue the march towards alternative SIS based on free and open software and standards. Join the cause and help us create a thriving community!

openSIS 4.6 Available for Download

Open Solutions for Education (OS4Ed) has released version 4.6 of the open source student information system, openSIS. Version 4.6 completes the full migration to a MySQL database, numerous fixes and several new features that continue to establish openSIS as the leader in open source student information systems for the K-12 and high ed markets.

For full information on the release notes, click here.

openSIS is designed to meet the needs of small and medium school districts using free and open software. Full support options are offered in variety of levels to fit the budget of every school or district. The openSIS community is growing every day and one can find answers and community support at the openSIS forums.

Check out this great offering that is free to download and use and requires no commercial software.