Learning Environments
Student Management & Learning Management Systems 2

 

 

Q: 24/7 & Interoperability?

A: The WEB (maybe)

The SMS for the school is not a stand alone tool which will deal with every aspect of school assessment and reporting functionality and hence it is imperative that it can share data with other applications.

Vendors need to be able to offer schools an strategic interoperability plan showing how data can shared by the SMS, LMS and other applications (AsTTle etc.)

There are a number of reasons we are strongly encouraging schools to consider an online SMS product:

1. The SMS for the school is not a stand alone which will deal with every aspect of student assessment and reporting functionality and hence it is imperative that the SMS can share data with other applications. This may be done via the web or via direct data exchange within the sever environment.

2. You do not want to be entering data sets of student names, classes, subjects, interest areas, passwords etc. two, three of four times and wondering which is the correct data set.

3. Teachers need to be able to access their school data and be able to submit school data 24/7 which means that they need to be either able to "tunnel" into the school server to add content or they use the internet as the vehicle by which to access their SMS. The internet and the web browser are technologies that most teachers are familiar with and this reduces the "technology overhead" which a school has to invest in when training staff.

4.Quality assessment will need to "blend" formative and summative data. This means that quantitative data collected via the SMS may need to be merged with qualitative, (formative) assessment material collected via the LMS. There is a variety of ways these can be merged and some proprietary systems provide a mechanism for this but increasingly the web is becoming the primary vehicle for such interoperability.

5. For many schools the hosted SMS\web solution will have a range of advantages. This type of software solution, known as an Application Service Provider (ASP) solution. By hosting the SMS solution for you, the amount of time required by your school to manage the hosting and security of your solution is reduced considerably.

6. By hosting your application on their server you do not have to be constantly updating the software as improvements and patches are sent through on a CD every few months. Data is backed up for you, security is enhanced and the ASP solution uses the schools present infrastructure.

For these reasons increasingly most of your schools software applications will be hosted on the internet on a server that you will never see and never have to provide support for.