OpenStudent Replaces Traditional Student Achievement System

The province of British Columbia started out with a vision over 10 years ago to have "one student record, stored in one location, accessed by all authorized users." And all but four districts in the province, and many independent schools, followed this vision by adopting BCeSIS as their core student information system. Now, after eight years in production, the system will be discontinued by the vendor in 2015, which means all districts will be forced to consider alternative solutions.

From the ashes of a commercial product rises the implementation of an open source solution: openStudent. It is licensed under the Education Community Source license (modified Apache 2.0) to ensure that they have better control of the code...

Tim Agnew, along with Gregg Ferrie, Technical Lead, and Debby Davis, Stakeholder Facilitator, hope the openStudent project and their story will help to change the mindset of districts and schools around the country, and the world. He explains that in many places the case is that the technology, for the most part, is controlled by outside vendors and moves in sync with their needs (shareholders, etc), not with the needs of education. This causes a great loss of flexibility, control, functionality, interoperability, and affordability that school districts absolutely need. Districts, schools and stakeholders in their community's education need to know that the most important aspect of choosing the right education software (and related technologies) involves the ability to engage with the education community and connect technology directly to the pursuit of better education for students.