In last many years, there have been several trends in improving the Schools. There have been constant efforts from Educationists, Teachers and also Government to provide model school environment to produce the better Students.
School Administration focus area is the school infrastructure, classrooms, delivery of learning experience to students.
However, the school along with providing the learning also provides the overall development experience of the student. This may include other than courses support for physical education, library support, special classes like music, karate, swimming etc.
Trend of Integration of school’s disparate systems
The school also provides infrastructure for canteen and food services. Some school provides free nutritional programs for student as per state’s government aid. The school also provides the transport system for pick and drop of student from their residences. Some school also provides boarding services like hostel for outstation students.
Most of these systems are not part of the same school management application but separate applications which are not connected to each other.
Use Case1: Let us consider a scenario, when a new student gets an admission to a school. His entry is made into the school system. But his name is not entered into the Library system. His library entry is made manually by separate process. His profile is created again on which any special privileges required by his profile will become applicable. If he is from weaker section community and allowed to access more books from library, has to be updated in library system manually.
The trend is now to integrate these disparate school systems so that when a student gets admission his entry is made into school management system in one place and his profile is created in library system, transport system, canteen system and fees system (financial system) with special profile, if applicable. This removes the possibility of manual error and automation in the complete school environment.
Similarly, this integration also allows the principle to get the consolidated view of all activities of the school per student. It also allows the management to analyze and monitor the various programmes and their effect in totality. The data available is more consistent and useful because of reduction of manual errors.
This integration will also automate the end-2-end school management based on the activity like
Reports on the improvement of the students reports based on introduction of special program like Mathematical Olympiad.
Ordering more copies of a book which is high demand by students
Automating the process of canteen services based on consumptions
Transport facility notification to parents and students based on calendar and timings changes
This integration also allows innovating new ideas like updating the parents using SMS on sudden holidays, student reports, disciplinary activities etc.
Trend of Integration of different school system
Use Case2. Schools running with the state fund are mandated to show the utilization of the state’s fund by showing the improvement of school result over past year performance. It also may need to show the result of the school in various other ways like improvements in result of weaker section and result of girls etc.
This report may be compared across the schools. These trends of measuring and improvement are progressive but pose a problem because of different platform of the school systems.
Solution Trend
This requirement is being met by the SIF (School Interoperability Framework), specification by SIF Association http://www.sifinfo.org/us/index.asp , which provides
“The SIF Association´s vision is that schools will be enabled to better utilize technology in a manner that leverages the promise and capabilities of interoperability between disparate applications.”
The SIF is XML specification which provides the definition of the School domain objects. When the school make themselves compatible with SIF objects they get interoperable.
SIF provides the conceptual broker-hub architecture of this interoperability by using concept of ZIS(Zone Integration Server) which is broker to the agent representing the various school systems. The school system interacts through the agent which generates the SIF messages based on the application events. The other agents subscribing to these events receive the SIF message and perform its task.
Implementing Use Case1: School admission system’s agent on new admission generates SIF message and publishes to the ZIS. The library system, canteen system, transport system and other systems subscribing that new admission event receives the new Student Profile.
All these system now add the system in their own applications without any manual intervention.
Implementing Use Case2: Different state schools register to publish their data to the State Zonal Server. An agent at the Zonal server subscribe to all the data from the schools and puts into its data-warehouse. This data is used to create data-marts and star schema for analytics of the data and see the progressive results YearOnYear, QOQ; gender–wise, section-wise to judge the effective usage of their special funds.
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