Project Overview
(Last updated 18 August 2003)
Vision
The vision for the new school management system is that it will serve
the educators at schools, first and foremost. Its Open Source nature
will allow third party contributions, especially from learners and
staff within schools that use the software. Its initial use is intended
for South Africa but there is definite potential for its widespread
use in other countries, with particular focus on African countries.
The predominant focus of the system is to provide administrative
support to schools, including and definitely not limited to the
management of:
- Learners
- Staff
- Assessment and report-cards
- Timetabling
- Textbooks and other resources
- Learner attendance
- Extra-curricular activities
- Statistical reporting
Additional focusses have been considered for the future, including:
- DoE-level information management, including statistical, auditing
and reporting functionality;
- Educational functionality: since the system is a repository of
information holding information about the school, it is a natural
progression for it to be used in teaching: issuing and managing
homework and assignments, etc.
Yet Another School Management System
With numerous Open source and proprietary school management systems
available, it is natural for people to ask what the rationale is for
developing another one from scratch. To our knowledge there is no
South African Open Source school management system. Also, according to
a study initiated by TSF in 2002, existing Open Source systems are
either at very early stages of development, or would require
substantial modification to adapt them to our needs. The study
concluded that an Open Source school management system for South
Africa remains a need and a priority.
The key that will differentiate OSMIS from other initiatives is
a combination of:
- Platform independence: OSMIS will be composed entirely of OSS
components that will run on all popular computing platforms.
- Free licensing: OSMIS will be released under an Open Source
license (specifically GPL) as we believe that it is critical for
schools to have free access to the software. Hopefully, this will
enable the solution to be deployed at an overall lower cost than
any other solution. The Open Source license also empowers the
users of the software to make changes to the software and / or
contract out their customisation and modification requirements
without reliance on the original developers.
- Open Source development: A focus of this project is to instill a
sense of ownership and pride amongst its users. We will endeavour
to build a community of users and contributors consisting of
school staff and/or learners, SMMEs, educational organisations
and any other interested groups and individuals. Ultimately, we
would like to see the Open Source nature of the project expand and
adapt it for use in other countries.
The OSMIS Consortium
The OSMIS consortium consists of:
- CSIR's icomtek: The CSIR is responsible for higher-level roles such
as analysis, design and administration. CSIR is the prime contractor of
the project, which means that all administrative issues concerning
parties external to the consortium are dealt with through this
channel. In terms of the analysis and design roles, the CSIR will be
heavily involved in the requirements analysis and technical design of
the system, with a stronger focus on the former.
- School of Computer Science at Wits University: The role of Wits on
the project team also falls into the higher-level tasks of analysis
and design. In addition, Wits is the main project coordinator. In
terms of the analysis and design roles, Wits (like the CSIR) will be
heavily involved in the requirements analysis and technical design of
the system, with a stronger focus on the latter.
- Kgatelopele Technologies: Kgatelopele forms the core development
team of the project. They have to this point been involved in the
development of their own school management system -- eSchoolMan --
which has been deployed at 7 schools. This system, and the experience
gained from it, is a major contribution to this project. Kgatelopele
will also be involved in analysis and design tasks, but to a lesser
degree.
Other organisations -- in particular NetDay and TSF -- have
contributed significantly to this project thus far, and it is likely
that they will play important supporting roles throughout the duration
of the project.
Funding
The OSMIS project is currently being funded by
Imfundo of the UK
Government's Department for International Development.