Hello everyone, Having not heard from Dave this week, I want to assume that no news is good news on the cando front. Am I right in being so optimistic?
Anyway, I have been doing an analysis of the FET system and the various files you sent us, and I'd like to summarize my findings and ask some questions. First of all, I noticed that although FET expresses the various concepts like groups and subgroups differently than schooltool does, I see a predictable and reliable mapping between the two, and it will be no problem to write import scripts to get your data into schooltool (I've already begun this work). The only FET feature that schooltool does not support is groups (we call them terms) that overlap years. I don't believe that you need this feature. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing that a single year term would work for you. The question of student enrollment into classes seems to be addressed in FET by aligning students into what they call subgroups (we would use schooltool groups for this) and enrolling the entire subgroup into a set schedule of classes. That assumes that students will always enroll in classes together in this predictable manner which schooltool can support but does not require. The one thing that I didn't notice in the set of xml files that you sent us is the actual membership of any student in any of these subgroups. Could you please send us an xml file example of a list of actual student names and their membership in one of these subgroups? That will allow me to create an import of the actual students into schooltool and the classes they belong to. Reading your FeatureDetails document, I can see that you will be glad to take advantage of schooltool's groups for not only class enrollment, but also things like club membership and sports teams and the like. It's convenient that schooltool offers this group feature independent of class enrollment, and you can feel free to have teachers and students belong to any arbitrary number of independent groups. Any connection between a student's membership in a group such as '8b' in schooltool and their enrollment in the set of classes that students in '8b' attend is purely arbitrary from schooltool's point of view, and as I said before, we can support making that connection. You mentioned using groups for grade levels as well, and a subgroup such as '8b' suggests to me grade level 8, subsection b. Although you wouldn't have found documentation for grade levels in schooltool, we will have support for them in the custom schooltool package that we will be making for you. Eventually, that support will end up in schooltool core, but you will be amongst the first users of that feature in your custom package. One last question for now: are you intending to move all your FET data into schooltool as a one-time thing, and then use schooltool from then on, or do you intend to use both together for the years ahead? My analysis leads to the conclusion that you wouldn't need FET anymore, but I could have missed something. Please advise. Thanks, Alan _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~schooltool-developers Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~schooltool-developers More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
