From: Pete Helgren
Microsoft and Apple sold the "benefits" of their applications by moving
to a per-school model rather than a school district wide. Immediately
there were issues with consolidated reporting but the MS/Apple solution
was "better" because it wasn't "green screen".
Regarding district-wide systems vs. per-school systems, you make a good point about issues with consolidated reporting. During the past decade, it seems that people failed to weigh the enormous value of consolidated data - until after they lost it. Then they spent tons of time and money coming up with standards and specifications (ie. SIF) and systems to synchronize distributed databases.
It's actually worse than that. Not only did they install servers in schools, but they also installed Gradebook applications on teacher's laptops. That way they can pay attendance offices to maintain student demographic data on servers, and pay teachers to maintain the same data on their laptops. And spend time reconciling differences; The hidden costs of distributed computing!
Add to that the issue of State reporting. Tons of time and money spent inventing various ways for pushing data up to the State's data warehouse, where analysts run queries against it.
Put the applications and data in an IBM i "cloud" where everybody can use them! Our administrative interfaces enable users to drill down from districts, to schools, to fiscal years & terms, to teacher's gradebooks, to classes, to assignments, to individual student scores. A user in the State Department of Education could be using the same database and user interface as the teacher uses in the classroom. The only difference is that teachers would have streamlined navigation - and maintenance capability vs. inquiry.
And offer essentially the same interface and exactly same database to parents and students, so that EVERYONE is on the same page. Get rid of unnecessary distribution, consolidation, reconciliation workloads - wastes and problems!
-Nathan.
midrange.com
