ZDNet Education

Christopher Dawson

Late night musings on student information systems

By Christopher Dawson | June 17, 2007, 11:41pm PDT

Summary: We’re moving rapidly into the last month before we go live on our new student information system. This migration has been a long time coming and is a welcome move from an antiquated and overly-complicated product. We searched pretty extensively and evaluated several options, both client-server and web-based, centralized and distributed, locally-managed and [...]

We’re moving rapidly into the last month before we go live on our new student information system. This migration has been a long time coming and is a welcome move from an antiquated and overly-complicated product. We searched pretty extensively and evaluated several options, both client-server and web-based, centralized and distributed, locally-managed and hosted.

Ultimately we decided on X2, a relative newcomer to student information systems. While other systems had impressive features, X2 had a particularly nice combination of price, usability, and customer service. They were also local, so on-site support (if needed) is rarely a problem to arrange. So far, the customer service has been extraordinary, with actual people answering the phone at all hours. While they have normal tech support during regular business hours, I’ve called on Sunday afternoons and late at night and have talked to a person within a couple rings who could actually help me with my problem. I finally managed to call at a time when someone wasn’t there at 5:30 in the morning about a week ago. By 7:30, though, I had someone on the line and my problem was solved.

Better yet, they are hosting the whole application for us. They handle backups, security certificates, software updates, etc., yet most of the database is easily accessible via the web interface. The interface itself is also quite slick, using XML and AJAX in such a way as to speed transactions and create a really usable, user-customizable, tab-based set of screens. While it’s still a bit clickier than client-server applications, it’s light years ahead of our previous ASP/HTML-based system. It also works with every browser/OS combination I’ve thrown at it (except for OS 9.2/Internet Explorer 5, but I can let that one slide).

This really isn’t meant to be an endorsement of X2 specifically, since I’m sure there are countless legal reasons that it shouldn’t be. However, it does lead to a few recommendations for those of you looking at similar transitions this summer and in the year to come.

First of all, making this change at the end of the year, especially during scheduling season is a bad idea. That, of course, was our approach for a variety of administrative, political, and financial reasons, and it has been pretty painful. The migration to any new product is labor-intensive and difficult and requires your full attention; trial by fire during secondary-school scheduling just makes it that much more difficult.

Secondly, external hosting is good. Most companies can introduce such economies of scale by creating their own datacenters these days that this allows your data to be more secure for less money. No muss, no fuss, and one less server (or three or four) for you to take care of.

Third, we’ve been talking about Web 2.0 applications for years. It’s about time that it came to student information systems. A slick implementation leveraging all that AJAX and Web 2.0 can offer makes a web-based system much more tolerable, especially if you have staff used to a client-server system already.

Finally, there’s an old expression my dad always used: Fools rush in where angels dare to tread. That certainly applies here. Test systems, talk to people, run systems in parallel before you make the plunge, and make sure that whatever system you choose satisfies as many of your users’ needs as possible. This is a mission-critical system with which you and your users must live for a long time. As we leave one snap decision behind, I can’t stress enough the need for well-thought out migration and very serious testing and investigation before you make any moves.

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Web, Information System, Client-server, Migration, Student Information System, Christopher Dawson

Chris Dawson is a freelance writer and consultant with years of experience in educational technology and web-based systems. In 2011, he became the Vice President of Marketing for WizIQ, Inc., a virtual classroom and learning network SaaS provider.

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Christopher Dawson

Christopher Dawson is the Vice President of Marketing for WizIQ, Inc., by day and a freelance writer and educational technology consultant by night. Well, most of his colleagues at WizIQ are based in India, so really he's working with them whenever he can stay awake. He has worked for his local school district as a teacher and technology director, for the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, and for Biogen, Inc. (now Biogen-IDEC, Inc.). He has also consulted with STATNet and Cytyc Corporation and retains close ties with X2 Development Corporation (now owned by Follett Software, the supplier of the student information system he administered for several years). Follett is paying him a monthly honorarium to act as a presenter for their "SIS Voices for Student Achievement" community (he produces occasional blog posts and hosts a monthly webinar on the use of student information systems to inform data-driven instruction and school-wide change. He regularly purchases and/or recommends Dell hardware. This is because Dell makes good hardware and has truly committed itself to education in innovative ways, particularly with their "Connected Classroom" initiative. It isn't because he has dealings with the company through his role at WizIQ (which he does) or because they have provided him with long-term loans of a variety of equipment for in-depth testing (which they have). Intel (reference designer for the Classmate PCs he has implemented in his local schools) has provided him with long-term loans of Classmate PCs for testing, as have Dell and Lenovo with their educational offerings. He may report on any of these companies as his experiences with them have direct bearing on educational technology; positive reports are not necessarily an endorsement and he receives no direct financial compensation from these companies or any others. Intel paid all expenses for his attendance at the 2009 Intel Classmate PC Ecosystem Summit which he attended as the sole representative of the technology press. He was invited to attend in 2010 but his wife would have killed him if he spent 3 days in Vegas geeking out and left her home alone with a new baby. Acer provided him with a 50% discount on an Aspire One netbook in early 2009 after he tested it for 30 days through their educational seed program. He liked the netbook at the time but it has since broken and sits unused in his office. Canonical sent him Ubuntu lanyards, t-shirts, and mousepads for his kids. He stole one of the lanyards and proudly hangs his keys from it and occasionally features his 8-year old wearing an oversized Ubuntu t-shirt on his Facebook profile. Gunnar Optiks sent him a pair of computer glasses to evaluate for a holiday gift guide. He is wearing them now as he types this because they never asked for them back and they rock out loud. Seriously - they work brilliantly and make it much easier to spend 20 hours a day staring at an LCD. If they ever asked for them back, he would fork over the $99 and buy a pair. Microsoft gave him 2 free copies of Office 2010 professional, a desktop clock, and a useless book on Office 2010 when he attended the launch of Office/Sharepoint 2010. He occasionally uses the SharePoint lanyard they gave him instead of the Ubuntu lanyard for his keys, but feels dirty afterwards. Adobe provided him with a pre-release version of the CS5 Master Collection for evaluation and ultimately provided a full, licensed copy for ongoing testing of educational applications of this admittedly expensive software. Like the Gunnars, if the license expires or they come out with CS6, he'd actually go out and buy it himself. Which is saying something, because he's actually pretty cheap. Any other companies wishing to send him cool things to evaluate, wear, or otherwise adorn his kids are more than welcome to; he promises to disclose it here if he keeps any of the stuff. Finally, because WizIQ is a virtual classroom and learning network provider, Chris, as VP of Marketing, frequently interacts with, seeks out deals with, and directly or indirectly competes with a whole lot of LMS, SIS, and other Education 2.0 companies. In general, he'll limit his reporting about these companies to news that does not impact his relationship with them or with WizIQ. If he reports on them, it's because what they are doing is newsworthy or worth the attention of his readers and not because he's trying to broker some deal, damage competition, or otherwise advance his position in his day job. LMS and SIS companies, along with other online learning communities, are a pretty important part of Ed Tech. If he stops reporting on them completely, there won't be a whole lot left. He'll be sure to call out any overt conflicts of interest if they are unavoidable. Finally, Follett Software Company pays him a little tiny honorarium every month to present on their SIS Voices webinars and to write the occasional blog or discussion thread for them. Since Follett recently bought X2 (maker of an awesome web-based SIS that Chris just happened to have used, served in advisory groups for, and frequently reported on), this is probably also worth disclosing.