After working through this past weeks assignment of creating a rubric to select a LMS for Athabasca University, it got me thinking about the process our district is currently in to find a replacement Student Information System (SIS). For the past 2 years Districts in BC have known that the dreaded BCeSIS would be discontinued sometime in 2015/2016 – that time has now been set for the first part of 2016. You would have thought that district would begin to call in their stakeholders to look at options, and to discuss the selection and implementation of a new SIS… you would think… However, in my district that hasn’t been the case.

The replacement of BCeSIS has always been the white elephant in the room. Nobody wanted to talk about it because it was thought that the ministry would just provide a new one and life would be grand, but as time went on and the ministry’s path appeared to be “frightening” sour IT manager and I began to feel a little on edge. So we decided to attend a presentation put on by Pearson showcasing their product “PowerSchool”. These companies always put on a good show and I thought – “hey what a great product, we should look into that further”… nothing. We spoke often of the fact that BCeSIS was on the way out, and the impending changes, but no groups were called, nothing was discussed. A group from SD63, Saanich, decided that they were tired of the Off The Shelf products that were currently on the market, and decided to design “your last SIS” using opensource products. I attended a couple of their think tank meetings and reported back on the process… nothing. A few months ago the IT manager and I decided, on our own, to travel to Saanich and meet with the development team and discuss the product and talk about some of our concerns. We went, had some great Pizza, and were impressed. After returning home we mentioned we had gone and… nothing.  Shortly after that we attended another brainstorming meeting in Victoria and we were very engaged in the conversation, but we were not there on assignment, we went because we felt it is better be part of the conversation than not, we came home, the secretary treasurer asked what we thought, we told him, and he went away. The next week the OpenStudent group sent out a tweet with a link to a Times Colonist Article congratulating our district for Joining the OpenStudent project! We were… surprised to say the least. There was no planning, there were no discussions, or rubrics, there was just an announcement.

I hear about other districts and enterprises as they form committees and discuss their implementation plans, and think – “that would be nice”, to take a chance to form a consensus. To move TOGETHER as a cohesive group. I am considering taking the SECTIONS module to our Sr admin and asking if we could create a group to discuss the themes on an implementation view as opposed to a selection process, seeing that the product as already been found… it should be an interesting process…