eduTrac

An open source Student Information System to help educational institutions manage faculty, staff, students, courses and more.

Update: Download Alpha Version 1

Hello, my name is Joshua Parker, and I am currently working on a new project called eduTrac. eduTrac is an open source student information system (SIS) that will help educational institutions manage faculty, staff, students, courses, registration, NSLC transmissions, reporting, and other functions that a typical SIS may have.

Before I go on to describe in more detail about the project and what makes eduTrac different from any other SIS, allow me a moment to give you a quick run down of my background. I am a former college administrator who has more than 10 years experience working in the education sector. In addition, I've been a PHP developer for the same amount of time. When I started getting into technology and programming languages after college, for some reason it just clicked with me. However, I think I can attribute it to my music background (classically trained vocalist).

In the last 6 years of my career as a college administrator, I've worked with several different student systems. Each having qualities and functionality that were outstanding but having other qualities that were not. During those years, I've taken mental notes of both the good and the bad. Which now brings us to the present. Since I've gained a plethora of knowledge from other proprietary systems, I am using that knowledge to build a system which I think has a much more user friendly structure as well as tackles some of the pitfalls I've experienced with other systems.

A Few Notable Features

Benchmarking - enable when you need to troubleshoot bottlenecks

Audit Trail - activity log of records that have been created, updated, or deleted

Permissions - a robust hierarchical permissions system

Saved Query - save your most used select queries and run them when you need to

Communication Management - save custom email templates for email communication with students, faculty, or staff

Course Management - create/edit courses

Course Section Management - create/edit course sections

Semester - setup/manage semesters

Term - setup/manage terms

Person - a screen where you add new faculty, staff, students with the option of moving a person to the student table

Graduate student(s) - graduate one student at a time or create a saved select query to graduate a group of students

Transcripts - students can request transcripts, and transcripts can be exported to pdf for printing

Grading - faculty can enter letter grades at the end of every term

Departments - create departments or divisions

Credit Load - credit load setup screen

Program - create/edit academic programs, add student programs, add majors, add minors, add specializations, add CCD's

Building - add buildings, rooms, offices

Manage discipline codes

Manage student holds

Class - manage student classification (Freshmen, Sophomore, etc.)

NSLC Transmissions

IPEDS

What Makes eduTrac Different?

Four Reasons:

One, majority of the big name SIS/ERP’s out there are closed source and are under strict commercial licenses. Not so with eduTrac. It is open source, so that the community can get involved and make it even better.

Two, most of these proprietary systems need to be customized to fit an institution’s way of doing things. Which means that if core code is modified, upgrading can be a pain and even a nightmare. eduTrac will have an extension system which will allow programmers to write code that can hook into eduTrac’s functions without having to modify or hack core functionality. Now, there may be some small customizations needed here and there, but it’s the hope that these customizations will eventually go into the next version, making it easier to upgrade to new versions without fear of breakage.

Three, with eduTrac, institutions can install it on their servers and use their own database, or opt in to using a data warehouse to store data for scalability.

And four, eduTrac comes with an SQL Terminal. It is a secure interface to the data stored in the database that will allow users (with proper permissions) to create ad-hoc reports on the fly. This is unique because they won't be using some sort of query builder but instead, the user will retrieve exactly what he or she needs because of the relational data, and the user will become proficient with SQL syntax (training is available).

Goals

For eduTrac to be the most sought after open source & free SIS out there.

Offer a data warehouse option to institutions where their data will be securely stored in the cloud and scalable.

Rest API to make it easier to connect and integrate with other software like Moodle, eFront, etc.

Stretch Goals

$15,000 - Woohoo! Met the goal. At this level, I will build eduTrac with all the notable features listed above.

$20,000 - Add a RESTful API and a handful of plugins to connect with learning management systems such as Moodle, eFront, and others as well as apply for accreditation to offer continuing education units (CEU) for SQL training.

$25,000 - Acquirement of dedicated servers to host instances of eduTrac for institutions that may not have adequate resources.

$30,000 - Acquirement of dedicated cloud servers to use as a data warehouse for better scalability.

$35,000 - The addition of Bursar (Student Accounts) and Billing module.

$45,000 - Addition of a Human Resource, Payroll, and General Ledger module.

How Long Will it Take?

The tentative plan is to have a beta release out between March-April of next year, with hopes of getting it into some schools who are willing to give it a test drive for their summer terms. Those who contribute $200 or more will have the opportunity to view a prototype come mid-September.

How Can This Happen?

Only with the support and generosity of people who are passionate about open source and education can this become a successful project. Furthermore, spreading the word about eduTrac is key as well.

Screenshots



Screenshot of the setup screen for the National Loan Clearinghouse.



Screenshot of a person's record.



SQL Terminal screen for running advanced ad-hoc reports.

For Your Enjoyment

Would you like to see more screenshots of eduTrac? Then check out 7 Media's Flickr page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/7mediaws/sets/72157635065864286/ Check out and subscribe to the developer's journal for daily updates on development. You can also vote and comment on entries via the website or via email: http://journal.7mediaws.org/

Do you support open source? Do you support education? Then let's make this happen!