Gibbon for higher education

Greetings. I am interested in extending Gibbon’s functionality to satisfy the administrative needs of a summer school at the university level. I am the department chair of the linguistics department at the University of California Davis. Every other year our professional organization, the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), organizes a month-long summer school in linguistics. The “LSA Institute”, as it is known, gathers about 70 faculty and 300 students. The institute rotates from university to university. In 2019 we are in charge of organizing it. Here are the links to the LSA page and our own upcoming Institute:

https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/lsas-linguistic-institutes

http://lsa2019.ucdavis.edu

The Institute is really a mini-school that requires a lot of management, from booking rooms and assigning faculty to courses, to registering students and letting them choose courses and housing options. Universities have their own “registrar” and “course management” systems, but they do not allow external organizations like the LSA Institute to use them. I believe that with some customization (probably at the code development level) we can make it work for our summer school. I imagine that many other organizations at the higher education level might benefit from this development too, from institutions offering training to small liberal arts colleges.

If this sounds interesting and feasible to the system developers and anyone involved with this project, please let me know. I can post a list of the features I see we may need to add to Gibbon, as well as a list of the current features I find are most useful, to make it work for higher education institutions (e.g. no parent involvement, students choose their courses, seamless integration between registrar and course management functions, etc.). I Imagine the new features could be packaged as a “Higher Education” module that prospective users may add. Thanks for developing Gibbon, and for making it available to the educational community!

RAUL ARANOVICH

@r_aranovich Thats a good Proposal. Myself would be happy to get my hands on a module that can do those activities. In my university we used some ASP.NET Student management side integrated with Moodle and works well, including graduation requests, processing of financial aid etc. Am sure the module will support may people.

Raul, as James says, this is a good proposal, and would most likely benefit a range of schools. At current, our core development focus is on the object oriented rewrite of the code base, and then moving towards mobile responsive. In this sense we do not have the coding power to put into the project you propose.

However, I’d be happy to assist with input and direction, if you can find a coder happy to do the programming.

Is that an arrangement that might work for you?

At any rate, post the requirements and we’ll see if anyone else chimes in.

Cheers,

Ross