Student management system

Draft

Definition

(For most people) a Student management system (SMS) is software to manage all day to day operations for a school. They are also called student information systems (SIS), Student information management systems (SIMS), Student records system (SRS). Functionalities of such systems are not the same and this may reflect in the name adopted by users and vendors.

Some learning management systems also may provide SMS functionality, but the two are different.

List of typical features

• Handling inquiries from prospective students;
• Handling the admissions process;
• Enrolling new students and storing teaching option choices;
• Handling examinations, assessments, marks and grades and academic progression;
• Maintaining records of absences and attendance;
• Handling the award of credit or qualifications and graduation;
• Post-graduation contact with alumni.
• Fees
• Parents
• ...

Software

At university level SMSs often have been developed in-house (using enterprise software kits such as SAP or even J2E). Today, most institutions seem to adapt specialized software kits to their needs (with more or less success). For simple needs, there exist also turn-key applications.

See Comparison of student information systems (Wikipedia).

Some free systems found are below:

FreeSMS

• FreeSMS.
• FreeSMS (Free Student Management System) at sourceforge (download).
• Implementation: PHP, XSL (XSLT/XPath/XSL-FO).

Features:

1. Manage courses within a class environment
2. Sopport for profile based management: Administrator, Teacher and Student
3. Online teacher and student registration
4. Allow students to self manage class enrollment
5. Allow teachers to manage student attendance
6. Ability for students to submit course evaluations

Centre

• Centre is a free student information system for public and non-public schools.
• Implementation: PHP 4x, PostgreSQL
• Features: student demographic info, scheduling, grade book, attendance, report cards,eligibility, transcripts, and more.

OpenCartable

• OpenCartable.
• Seems to be more of a student/teacher support portal in the typical french tradition of "cartables électroniques".
• Implementation: Java
• “OpenCartable project is an electronic school and schoolbook system. OpenCartable is an online tool for teachers and their students organized around textbooks and bibliographies of links to Web sites or uploaded files. (Softpedia)”

Open Admin for Schools

• OpenAdmin for Schools (homepage)
• “Open Admin for Schools is a School Administration Program. It is a freely available, open source software package and is licensed under the GNU General Public License. (Softpedia, retrieved 13:01, 11 March 2008 (MET))”
• Implementation: Perl

Class

• ClaSS (ClaSS Student System)
• Features: student tracking, reporting and information management system (focussed on classroom support).
• Implementation: JavaScript, PHP, PL/SQL

Links

• Student Management Systems

• Comparison of student information systems (Wikipedia).

• Student information system (Wikipedia)

• Choosing an SMS. Recommendations of the NZ Ministry of Education