Learning Fedena teaches professors how to collaborate

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Leveraging 21st-century education with open source

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This academic year was my first year as assistant professor in the ISIGK (المعهد العالي للإعلامية و التصرف بالقيروان‬ | Tunisia). I enjoy teaching in this institute and being in Kairouan for many personal and professional reasons. Here I will talk about the benefits of using Fedena, a School Management Software (SMS), in the ISIGK (Higher Institute of Computer Science and Management of Kairouan).

Whereas this institute is specialized in computer science, the majority of managements tasks are done manually. This makes creating timetables and tracking students arduous tasks that could be automated by customizing Fedena thanks to its open source nature.

The academic and administrative teams could cooperate in this process of customization. These two teams have different backgrounds and skills, but by cooperating together they could produce innovative ideas. They could participate by coding or proposing ideas.

By customizing Fedena instead of creating a SMS from scratch, we could get software beneficial for the everyone--and in record time. In addition, we can get it free of charge, which is very interesting especially at this period when the economy of Tunisia isn't healthy.

Most importantly, Fedena will give academic and the administrative teams the oppotunity to communicate by working on that project. The communication between these two teams is important for achieving the academic goal of spreading knowledge and education. In the ISIGK, some negative prejudices make this communication problematic and difficult, creating a gap between the two teams.

The communication problem has an impact on the atmosphere within the ISIGK. The problem was amplified in the period that preceded the Arab Spring. During that period, where freedom of speech was limited, communication was difficult with anyone.

Now, we are at the post-revolution period. It's time for the the academic and the administrative teams to leave the prejudices behind them and to start working together. By participating on this customization project they will form one group; everyone will be part of that group and feel accepted by its members.

Students could also be part of the group by doing some customizations. For example, the students could gain knowledge of the Ruby on Rails framework in order to realize its potential for customization. Ruby on Rails isn't included in their curriculum, however, the students could master this framework quickly thanks to many free web resources. This gives them the possibility to work on real problems and the opportunity to discover the open source world and all its benefits.

2 Comments

This is very awesome! One of my professors develops a CMS called <a href="https://github.com/expertiza/expertiza">Expertiza</a>, and for his class in Object Oriented Systems, many of the class projects give students the option of adding features to or refactoring the codebase for the CMS they use on a daily basis.

One of the biggest advantages to customizing an open-source tool is that the users who are familiar with it already have their workflow in mind. This makes implementing changes easier (since the developers know how the tool behaves) but it also makes deploying them easier (no need for extensive re-training). In my example, students are prime candidates to make changes since they know how their CMS operates from a user's side. In your example, the same is true for the professors who work with their SMS.

This is a great article. 90% of <a href="http://fedena.com">Fedena </a> downloads are happening from developing nations of Africa, Asia and South America.

The number one priority while developing fedena was to make sure it is optimized for customization. It is simply because of the reason that the schools and colleges around the world has different system and process even if they are coming from same geographic area.

Fedena is a student information system framework on top of which you can build the perfect erp for your institution.

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