Event Driven Applications : Rather than Procedural

[bwfc_nottingham]

Hi All

 

 

Our SLT are looking at changing the way some of our MIS systems work

 

 

One of the drawbacks we have is that many apps built for schools are procedural rather than event driven apps.

 

What I mean by that is they depend on the user doing something e.g. running a report, entering data in a marksheet, entering behaviour / achievements

 

In an event driven application it is the event that triggers a process e.g.

 

• A detention is created for a student, we might want the creation of that detention to trigger an email to the students head of house, rather than running a report at the end of the day saying "these are the detention students". The event here would be "detention created", trigger process to generate an email.
  

 

 

• If a student is registered as attended for period 3, but they have no mark 15 minutes into period 4, we might want to generate an alert to the Attendance Officer warning them that we have potential truants, rather than the attendance officer running a report manually. The event in this case would be "time to check for truants" and the process would be alert the attendance officer (using whatever way we wanted to...report / email / txt etc)
  

 

 

We are looking to try and find an package that supports event driven processes and schedules, particularly in the areas of behaviour and attendance.

 

 

We currently uses SIMS / SISRA analytics

 

 

Many thanks

 

Phil

[pcstru]

We use sharepoint lists with workflows for various management tasks. We populate various lists from the MIS system by an archane data transfer driven by powershell.

[dhicks]

In an event driven application it is the event that triggers a process

 

I've had much the same thought, although I couldn't find any kind of drop-in solution for our systems, or for the education market in general. Individual events would be easy enough to write code for - you could have a script that periodically runs a SIMS report, parses the results and does whatever you want it to do. It's not quite event driven, but you could have the script run every 5 or 10 minutes or whatever. That would result in a wodge of site-specific code, though, which would need maintaining, updating, modifiing, etc., which most schools would have difficulty doing. What we need is kind of an IfThisThenThat for schools - link it to your MIS and have a bunch of handily selectable items for doing tasks like those as you describe above.

[matt40k]

Be worth raising with @PhilNeal for a future change @bwfc_nottingham.