Opensource Educational Software

[SteveSaywell]

I'm interested in joining the working group, I have no Python coding knowledge but happy to help in other ways. I'm a network manager of a school with Progresso, they offer a really good API for exporting information that I have experience with so can help with that as well.

[robputt]

Ok,

 

I am going to spend a couple evenings getting a few small collaboration peices set up for the working group, e.g. a meeting calendar etc... and then I'll write a few docs and send some links. I think mostly it'll be centered around GitHub Issues, GitHub Projects and probably Slack & Google Hangouts, any objections / alternatives people would like to suggest before I get these in place?

 

Best Regards,

 

Rob

[dhicks]

Best bet (for wide MIS compatibility) is to try to get the reporting facilities to produce appropriately populated CSV files.

 

For the client-side tool(s), there needs to be a "test" mode of some kind that produces dummy data in a predictable way, maybe replacing actual data with data generated by the position of the item or similar. We can't test a system like this with people's actual, real data.

[mavhc]

Sounds good.

 

WRT SIMS linking, the non paying official way would be to have a program that's installed on your system that runs its own sims reports with commandreporter, and uploads the resulting files.

[danbuntu]

something like this can create that data:

 

https://www.mockaroo.com/

[Mcom]

Sounds good.

WRT SIMS linking, the non paying official way would be to have a program that's installed on your system that runs its own sims reports with commandreporter, and uploads the resulting files.

 

Rclone is a great tool to upload files to cloud storage.

 

rclone - rsync for cloud storage

[robputt]

something like this can create that data:

https://www.mockaroo.com/

 

 

Nice find here danbuntu! Looks pretty damn useful and so many data types covered too

[robputt]

Just wondering if this thread should be moved to a software section of the forum rather than General Chat? Mods?

[elsiegee40]

Moved to Educational Software for the moment. I'll have a word with ZH about an Edugeek Projects forum for it

 

Can you give us a working project title to use please?

[robputt]

Thanks elsiegee40, it's more of a collection of projects rather than 1 individual project, under GitHub I have registered them under a group called the "British Open Educational Software Group" I would suggest we use the same name for the sub forum and then we can discuss all the projects related to the group in the forum.

 

Best Regards,

 

Rob

[elsiegee40]

Thanks elsiegee40, it's more of a collection of projects rather than 1 individual project, under GitHub I have registered them under a group called the "British Open Educational Software Group" I would suggest we use the same name for the sub forum and then we can discuss all the projects related to the group in the forum.

 

Best Regards,

 

Rob

@ZeroHour Can they have an Edugeek Projects section for this please?

[GrumbleDook]

If you are serious about Open Source in Education then here are a number of existing projects that have either run and died, or run and come to a completion (and often not really gotten anywhere).

 

Sorry if it sounds a tad negative, but a *lot* of good work has been put in previously and I would hate to see anyone repeat mistakes, fail to capitalise on previous efforts and it might also spark off interest on folks who had given up hope.

 

https://schoolforge.net

Open Source Schools (via the Wayback machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20060112171100/http://opensourceschools.org/)

https://opensource.com/tags/education

Karoshi - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Linux_Schools_Project

Open Office in Education - https://www.openoffice.org/marketing/education/schools/

The SchoolTool Book — The SchoolTool Book

Open Source Options For Education

https://opensource.org/osi-open-source-education

 

And don't forget if you are talking data interchange for student information then you need to chat to folk at SIFA(UK), and experts such as @GREED

 

And let's not forget the folk over at C@S too ... who have some stalwarts of OSS in education such as Miles Berry (as @dhicks will attest ... Miles has long pushed for OSS).

You could also see if some of the good folk out there can give some advice too ... perhaps someone like John McLear (http://mclear.co.uk/)?

 

Good luck with it all.

[zag]

Sometimes its better just to start from scratch with these things, the technology moves on very fast

[mavhc]

There's the design part, finding out what people actually want in the software, and the coding part. Then once those 2 easy parts are done you can move onto actually getting people to use it and finding a way to keep it going.

 

Everyone who's not techy doesn't care if it's open source, that's only going to attract the tech people. If you're going to sell that as an advantage it's basically: You can pay us to run this, but if you ever decide we're doing a bad job, anyone else can legally run the same service, including yourself. If we don't provide new features you want, you can pay someone else/yourself to add them. All your data can be exported and all the formats are open, so your investment in time isn't wasted.

[GREED]

experts such as @GREED

 

 

I'm not so sure about that...

[dhicks]

But would all the data that would be needed to extract be in the same place from school to school?

 

Good point. An idea: the people dealing with figuring out the commonalities between existing systems already are the people making the cloud-based systems like Clever.com. They are creating meta-MIS systems, if you like, with databases that fit data exported from various different systems. We could turn that round again (a meta-meta-MIS...) and create a minimal MIS that supports just the data necessary to sync with various external providors - Clever.com, SalamanderSoft's link to GSuite and similar, Microsoft's new data syncing tool. This MIS wouldn't be anything fancy, and probably wouldn't really be intended for production use, the idea would be to have a test platform to produce data around which we could then build further services.

[zag]

Good evening,

 

Sorry for the really long delay in getting back to you all...

 

Today I took a plunge into the world of making this stuff a reality, I've decided we should probably put a MIS on the back burner for a while, but I started up a Github group and started putting together some stuff for a ParentMail clone...

 

https://github.com/British-Open-Educational-Software-Group

 

If you want to see the code so far checkout the dev branch. (Yep I know the functionality is uber simple at the moment but lets keep it small and grow it iteratively) https://github.com/British-Open-Educational-Software-Group/OpenSchoolMail/tree/dev - I have started writing some docs as well, once I get the UI started I'll host a demo environment so everyone can play with it.

 

I also propose we have a bi-weekly / monthly meeting so we can get input / discuss with contributors etc... What do you think? What sort of day / time suits you todo this?

 

Best Regards,

 

Rob

 

Could you add me to the group as a member please?

 

I'd love to contribute and publish some of my OpenSource Apps there. Github Profile

[robputt]

Zag - Just added you to the GitHub org, you should have an invitation in your notifications :-). However remember you can contribute even when your not a member of the org by forking the repo, making any changes you like and then raising a PR against the upstream repo (I'll add instructions on how todo this to the docs).

 

"Everyone who's not techy doesn't care if it's open source, that's only going to attract the tech people. If you're going to sell that as an advantage it's basically: You can pay us to run this, but if you ever decide we're doing a bad job, anyone else can legally run the same service, including yourself. If we don't provide new features you want, you can pay someone else/yourself to add them. All your data can be exported and all the formats are open, so your investment in time isn't wasted." @mavhc, totally agree this is how we should be selling it, the fact that feature requests are fed from the end user and there is freedom around how you run such software is a huge advantage. Like any opensource project if the project is worth anything people will build products around it, e.g. look at what's happened with OpenStack and so on, initially it was just a few projects and now it's running some of the world's biggest clouds, hopefully we can start with just a few projects but one day be a real proposition for schools either directly or via third party SaaS providers.

Thanks for the comments and good wishes everyone.

[zag]

Thanks, Yeh I'm familiar with Pull Requests as contribute to other projects.

 

Look forward to what this brings.

 

Its just nice to have a central area for holding these things, and UK focused too

[robputt]

Ok,

 

Just a quick update, I've been out for a few weeks on holiday, so far I have extended the models on the OpenSchoolMail app to allow groups of groups and I have started work on the admin UI (the UI bits are still in my personal branch and not PR'd to dev branch yet). Zag feel free to pull your other projects into the GitHub Org as well if you like (providing they are education related and opensource licensed of course). Did we have any update on getting a board configured on EduGeek for discussions surrounding this?

 

Best Regards,

 

Rob

[dhicks]

Came across this today - a open-source mail platform:

 

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14201562

[ZeroHour]

Came across this today - a open-source mail platform:

 

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14201562

 

Very slick looking I have to say but like others say part of paying for a service is the ip reputation although shared pool is very variable.

[dhicks]

Very slick looking I have to say but like others say part of paying for a service is the ip reputation although shared pool is very variable.

 

Indeed - this struck me more as free software to run your own (hopefully highly-reputable) email service with, possibly for a particular niche market (such as education) rather than something an individual developer or company would run themselves.

[robputt]

Damn, Postal looks pretty damn good for a mass mailer. Obviously it has a lot more uses than the educational market but the fact this is self hosted and has decent tooling to manage IP reputation etc... could mean long term saving schools on mass mailing compared to AWS / MailGun / Sendgrid etc... I'll look into integrating it with OpenSchoolMail. Talking of which I reckon v1.0 should be ready towards the end of October, I'll probably need to get a demo together so people can check it out.

[dhicks]

Any further updates, did anything further come of this thread?