[schooltool] Greetings from Finland and a question on student data

[Elias Aarnio]

Hello,

Let me introduce myself. My name is Elias Aarnio. I work 50% of my time
for COSS, The Finnish Centre for Open Source solutions. The field of
education is my responsibility. I also work in another education related
project as an OSS specialist.

I have been following the discussion on the schooltool lists for a few
weeks by now.

I am not a programmer myself - more something of a really advanced user
and a wannabe techie. I have been dealing with localization issues and
some other tech stuff and done some administration.

It has been interesting to read about the student data discussion.
During the discussion I received a copy of a brand new Finnish XML
definition on student data. It is quite comprehensive and it has been
designed carefully to cover all different kinds of education from
preschool to higher education. The definitions are designed to ensure
interchangeability of data between the data systems of different
educational institutions and administrative bodies.

Now, I would like to ask would it be possible to include this definition
into the data definition of Schooltool. I understand this would be a
challenging task. On the other hand the needs and practises are
relatively similar all over Europe and the trend is towards greater
unity in things like this.

What do you think about this?

Sincerely,

[Tom Hoffman]

Post by Elias Aarnio
It has been interesting to read about the student data discussion.
During the discussion I received a copy of a brand new Finnish XML
definition on student data. It is quite comprehensive and it has been
designed carefully to cover all different kinds of education from
preschool to higher education. The definitions are designed to ensure
interchangeability of data between the data systems of different
educational institutions and administrative bodies.
Now, I would like to ask would it be possible to include this definition
into the data definition of Schooltool. I understand this would be a
challenging task. On the other hand the needs and practises are
relatively similar all over Europe and the trend is towards greater
unity in things like this.
What do you think about this?

Hi Elias,

Thanks for your interest. I'd certainly like to have a look at the
definition, can you point me to a copy of it? We're trying to make a
default schema which will work in a wide variety of schools.

However, what we'd really want to do in a case like yours, where we
can coordinate at a national scale, is set up a custom profile for
your country that provides the demographic schema and reports you
need.

--Tom