l hope you are all doing well. Looking for solution for the problem that I have at my hand.
I am system administrator for a company that offers E-Learning services in Zimbabwe. We offer custom made solutions for schools and colleges. Recently we got a contract from Methodist Church. The church runs 8 schools, 3 primary & 5 high schools.
All the schools are very different on how they operate e.g different fees structures, geolocation , curriculum etc.
The contract that we got is to develop one consolidated system to manage all the schools. The following are the main requirements
All students, teachers & parents to login one platform
All invoicing to be generated from one central point
Timetables & activities to be centralized
I have worked with some of the schools are I installed gibbon & Moodle previously (before we won the contract) and all is working fine.
Am tasked to design the system architecture and make recommendations for this project.
My questions is will Gibbon work on such environment? If so how do l split schools to make each school a different entity.
What other main factors should I consider for this project to be a success.
Looking forward for your assistance
Timothy Shava
+263 772 837 385
At current, you can install multiple copies on a single Gibbon server (separate installations, either using sub-domains, or sub-folders), but there is no way to manage multiple installs from one code base (like WordPress Multi Sites). At this time, this scope functionality would require a massive re-write of the codebase, and is not on our current roadmap.
If the schools are very different (different fees structures, geolocation, curriculum etc.), it may be a logical challenge on top of a development one to centralize all this information. Some possible suggestions:
For “All students, teachers & parents to login one platform”, if you are using a single-sign-on such as Google Apps for Education, you could manage offer this sign-on for Gibbon, allowing you to centralize the login access for users, although they would still login to a separate Gibbon install per school.
Invoicing and timetabling would be considerably difficult to centralize. One possible option would be to develop a separate module with API access, enabling you to build an external “central dashboard” that can query each Gibbon install via an API. This would be a significant undertaking development-wise. One place to start would be to look at the https://github.com/GibbonEdu/module-meetTheTeacherMeet The Teacher module, which was generously developed by Jim Spier, a MTT developer, as an API bridge between Gibbon and the Meet The Teacher booking system.