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
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