Comment by antigen8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by antigen8 | Hacker News Reader

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Update:

Thank-you to everyone responding, especially those who are helping enormously by giving me real-talk; Here's some more information about my situtation:

The legacy system I referred to has limitations that make it very uncomfortable to contemplate continuing to use it as our sole data source. Some issues: - The database is updated once a day; Any changes you add to it today won't show until tomorrow. - Student absences (important so we can see cutting, lateness, etc) can be recorded once per day; students are either "at school" or not. - There are numerous categories of data that we have that can't be tracked or stored, for expample, whether a student is involved in a sports team. We have a large body of instructional data about how students are doing in class, but we're struggling to bring it together to get a full picture because as far as our main system is concerned, students receive a grade at the end of their course for their transcript, and that's that.

I'm not going to ignore what I'm being told and I think that building a new solution is beyond our capacity; we have to keep our focus on teaching the kids as well as we can. But we have a very young staff and an administration committed to exploring our options. I've already been looking at Tableau and it's so powerful and approachable that we can definitely use it. The difficulty I now face is what tool can we use to complement and expand the system that's causing a lot of grief.

We need to be able to store types of information including absences, student biographical info, grades; we want to be able to store student ID pictures, lesson plans, notes from teachers. Points of contact with parents. What we think we know is that we need a SaaS solution, we have regulatory compliance issues (not to mention ethical requirements) around security and privacy of our data, which many of you noticed.

I'm reading every single comment and will respond by email and here where it makes sense. We know we need help even to understand our problem. YC 2016 would be top of my priorities right now, but there are ethics rules preventing me from being a vendor to any NYC public school while I'm working at one. As much as it makes sense ethically, it really seems like that shouldn't be the department's focus when they have kids who can't read yet and they can't tell you which kids they are.

Hey - i'm a recent CS grad so this may be naive.. but heres the easiest possible solution - export all the data from the old system, and throw it into a Google Docs Spreadsheet - google apps is free for education. [1] Thats the simplest UI possible, not that easy to use though.

If you want a more custom tailored solution, you need a programmer to 1. create a dump of all your data 2. create a web frontend to display it and update it nicely. A club in my college did this kind of thing - they worked on simple websites for local companies. College students are a great option because this is an easy enough project (technically that is, i dont know about the politics) and they will work for free.

I don't know much about slicker SaaS solutions - Tableau is definitely pretty great. Sometimes SaaS companies will offer demos over skype of the product and can answer your questions - i say take advantage of that, tell them your problem and let them answer how well their product can work for you.

[1] https://www.google.com/edu/products/productivity-tools/

Google Spreadsheets is absolutely not what a government school would consider private or secure, nor is it likely to be able to handle a database like this, as it tends to crap out a little ways into the 5-figure row region.

They also won't pay some college kids to do it, enterprises, especially government enterprises, tend to require contractual support, which is probably outside the realm of what a college kid can or would want to do

I was a Technology administrator at a k-12 schools before coming to NYU. What you describe are (unfortunately) pretty classic issues that tons of schools (as we did) faced. Feel free to reach out if you want to chat about how to start tackling this. Would love to help in any way I can, and I'm local too.

I'd be thrilled to start a conversation with you, it would be great to take advantage of your insights.

I put an email in my profile

I just started doing database and training work for a school district that has been using Infinite Campus (https://www.infinitecampus.com/) for the last 5 years. Infinite Campus sounds like it is another package that would accomplish your goals.

Some positives:

- Browser based, modern browsers supported

- Permissions galore to minimize data exposure and to support external policies (FERPA, etc)

- Fulfills the brief requirements you outlined

- Iterative development, they drop releases faster than we're comfortable taking them

- Data is exportable, we're doing custom transcripts for the state college, custom exports for Clever, etc.

Some negatives:

- Proprietary

- UX doesn't seem to be a priority, it isn't horrible in most cases but it isn't great. To be fair, some of that may be due to feature creep in our installation / district ("Oh, you can develop custom fields and tabs? Great, lets make all of them"). There's already some workflows I've automated with AHK (again, our district policies are at least partially to blame).

Other notes

- Our installation is JSP / MSSQL, not sure if other databases are supported.

- Some reporting functionality built in, we've developed some external reporting around it to fill holes

- Custom development costs $$$ (not going to get this for free anywhere though)

- Old versions of IE have been left behind (I view this as a positive, IT departments might want to hold on to their IE 9 deployments)

- We used to use SASi, I don't know the reasons behind migrating away from it

I'd suggest evaluating Infinite Campus alongside some of the alternatives. I'd also see what other districts in NY are using and compare notes on the various state and district level customizations they've done. Discuss pain points alongside what just works and what shows up on the "I wish we could ..." list.

Contact me if you'd like more information.

Maybe the people who made or support this software can update the frequency of the batch jobs (e.g., every 15 minutes instead of every 24 hours)? After that, perhaps they can add a couple more fields for you to track the additional data.

I'd start with asking your administrator for that. If that person wants to go wild and bring in the million dollar software consulting team for a brand new solution, then let that be his/her idea, for you own benefit.

logn-

I really appreciate this insight, I think that would really be the ideal solution. I have satisfied myself that it won't be possible- the software we're talking about is one slice of a highly sophisticated network of services operated by the DOE- the largest and most complex school district in the country (and I know of no larger similar educational organization in the world).

I came into this believing that the DOE would address these issues if it could, that the system was simply too complex for anyone to be able to update it effectively. I hope that's true. What is certainly true is that there is an impending crisis in the management of educational data and one way to reduce the impact to our community is to begin cultivating a data management strategy which reduces our dependency and increases the robustness of our digital approach.

This might help some:

http://www.canvaslms.com/

It's actually open source, you can host it yourself if you chose or they will run it for you for a fee. You can program against it... build plugins etc. There are also a large number of plugins already available. It's written in Ruby on Rails with a Cassandra DB.

Thanks for sharing this- as a school, we do already use canvas! One of the ways we're attacking our data problem is to make more effective use of canvas, but like all the other services we use, it's becoming clear that it is only part of the solution.

That said, it's my job to make sure we're not overlooking the ability to make our "problem" disappear by making better use of our resources; so I'll be agressively reevaluating the chain of decisions that brought us to this moment

Thanks for the update.

Can I ask if you guys are using Powerschool SIS? It's pretty common in the educational sector, and it's designed specifically for medium-to-large school districts. I worked with it only briefly a very long time ago (when it was called SASi), as it started to replace the COBOL mainframe system that the school district I worked at had been using. I'd be a little surprised if it has all the problems you describe. At the time, I'm pretty sure it had support for everything you're asking for.

Are there any automated import/export options for the system you're currently using? Any way at all to minimize the amount of duplicate data entry you'd have to do? Even if you used something like AutoHotKey (http://ahkscript.org/) to do it?

I have a recommendation that's probably not going to be real popular with the rest of HN, because it's not 2015 Buzzword Compliant, but: have you considered just using FileMaker Pro?

It's cheap, they offer discounts for education, and it's fairly easy to use. You don't need to be a programmer to get going with it. It's really, really common, especially in the small business market, so finding people that can work with it is easy. They even have a pile of ready-made applications for schools (http://solutions.filemaker.com/made-for-filemaker/search.jsp...), including one that seems to hit your immediate needs (http://solutions.filemaker.com/made-for-filemaker/detail.jsp...) (caveat: looks like that version of their software might not be editable; the vendor wants you to contact them for a customizable version).

You could throw a FMP server together for $1,000 or less, software included, and be up and running with your first version in a day or two. Treat it like your minimum viable product, use it for end-user testing and figure out what you do and don't like about it, and then if you decide in one or two years that you still really need a custom system, you'll have a very detailed list of requirements that will help the build process a lot.

And FMP is pretty decent about playing nice with other software and allowing you to export data, so you don't have to worry too much about vendor lock-in.

FMP server: we just recently did a server upgrade for the Friendship Club, for really cheap. A Mac Mini works just fine as an FMP server for a small number of users, add in an external drive for Time Machine backups, then your FMP license and a license for the pre-made K12 FMP application to get you started.

Feel free to drop me a line at the email address in my user profile. I work a lot with clients with constrained budgets. I could bat around some options with you.

And if you're looking bigger-picture, pretty much the entire SIS market sucks. Somebody could come along and develop a new product that was modern and robust and it could quickly be better than all of its competitors. But, it would also be really tough to get that exponential growth curve that YC and its kin all want to see because so many school districts would be reluctant to go through the trouble of switching systems, no matter how bad their current system was.

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