ProEd - School Administration System
Approved by the Education Department.
The software operates on all known open system networks. Currently it is running in Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, Millenium, Novell and NT networks at 123 schools.
ProEd is fully Windows, Y2K (2000) and barcode compliant.
ProEd caters for any number of concurrent users on the same network.
The security module allows the system administrator to define exactly what a user is allowed to do within ProEd.
It has an easy to use, comprehensive manual.
ProEd consists of a number of integrated modules. A data item is only entered once into the ProEd system. From there, it is immediately available across the network to any number of users working in disparate systems. The learner names and class data automatically updates the ProLib Media Centre Software.
ProEd is capable of operating in a multi-lingual mode. Users can operate in a language of choice. Parents can choose to receive documentation from the school in a language of choice.
It is ProGen’s stated intention to provide within ProEd a module for every administrative aspect within the school. The modules were prioritized by a large group of administrators and bursars during the initial project design phase. The current project schedule has all of the major aspects completed by the end of 2006. The following modules are available now, are installed in many schools, and are proven.
ProEdLite is exactly the same software as ProEd with some of the modules disabled. It is intended for those schools that do not require the extensive functionality provided within ProEd. ProGen realises that some schools do not need certain modules and so the ProEdLite product offers a cheaper solution, which can always be upgraded to the full ProEd version at any time in the future.
ProEdLite does not contain the following modules:
Sport
Discipline, Merits & Demerits
Asset Management
Report Writer
Letter Module
Prize Giving
Either Finanance or Marks, the school can choose which one.
Learners (Pupils), Parents, Staff (Educators), Past Learners and Applicants
This module contains a very comprehensive database on the learner, parent, educator and past learners at your school. With ProEd you can keep any number of years of data on-line, and move back and forth between the academic years at will. Profiles can be kept on any type of staff member, not only the educators.
Addresses
Contact Phone Numbers
Emergency ContactsReport Cards
Dependants Evaluation Reports
Family structures Vehicles
Ailments Licenses Obtained
DisabilitiesExtra Mural Activities
Attendance RegistersAwards & Recognition
Absenteeism Registers Classes
Disciplinary RegistersSubject Lists
Medical profiles Examination & Test Results
Interest Areas School Fees & Extra Subject Fees
Sporting Activities Debit Order Facilities
Detention
Absenteeism, Lateness, Early Leaving, Merits, Demerits, Detention and Discipline Levels
The system has a comprehensive absenteeism, latecomer and early leaver module which provides in depth statistical details from learner right through to school level. A data base on individual misdemeanours, absenteeism, detention, appraisals and awards received is linked to a merit/ demerit points system, and a Discipline System. The rules are defined by the school. Absenteeism can be recorded for both learners and staff. All the reports required by the Department of Education are available within the modules.
Subjects (Learning Areas)
The system allows the user to build up a cross referenced database of the subjects allowed in each grade. When a learner’s subject mix is entered, the system checks if it is logical. The system caters for all the known rules concerning OBE and FET based study courses. It also comprehensively caters for the Matric Endorsement rules. The system caters for situations where learners may belong to one register class but attend many different subject classes with learners from differing register classes.
The subjects offered within the school can be classified in many different ways such as courses, subject combinations, the sequence they must be shown on reports, core subjects and subject marking rules. There are no limits on the number of different subjects that can be defined within the system, taken within a grade, or studied by a learner.
The Marks System
A comprehensive marks system allows the Subject Heads to define the breakdown of a subject into a maximum of 8 outcomes with marking rules for each, at Grade level. Educators can enter Test marks at any time throughout the Term, and the Educators are encouraged to keep their mark books on line within ProEd. Any of these tests can be automatically included or excluded from those marks that are to be considered when calculating the Report Period Totals. At no time do the Educators have to perform any calculations. The Educator can also export/import test marks between ProEd and Excel, so marks capturing can be completed at home.
All calculations from Learner through to Grade Averages and Education Department reports are automatically calculated by the system. At Report Period end the system ensures the integrity of the data being passed through to the Academic Reports. Numerous checklists enable Educators and Learners to ensure that the data on the Academic Reports, Mark Schedules and Education Department Reports are correct when issued.
The academic year can be broken up into a maximum of 6 Report Periods. In the spirit of ‘continual assessment’, the educators can design report periods that include percentage weightings of the marks achieved in previous periods. Again, all the educator does is define a simple rule, and ProEd does all the calculations.
The marks system also caters for the concept of Effort and Attitude symbols to be captured at the test levels. These are either averaged or selected by predominant code, to give an overall Effort and Attitude symbol for the learner at subject and overall levels.
Marks can be identified as being assessed or that the learner was absent; and these indicators can be carried forward onto the academic reports. The reports can be designed in any of the official languages, and ProEd provides translations from the school standard.
A Report Writer allows each school to design its own format of academic report. If required, a school can have many different formats of Academic Reports. Reports can be generated on pre-printed stationery, on letter heads, or even mail merged into MS Word documents. A number of reports can be generated for the same learner, but for different members of the family, and these reports can be in the language of choice of that family member. Each recipient can also use a different mailing address.
The marks system is totally OBE, FET and Matric Endorsement compliant.
A comprehensive comments system allows the educators to prepare comments for a learner at subject and overall performance levels. These comments can be captured on-line within ProEd, or they can be captured in Excel and imported into the ProEd system. The comments can be automatically placed onto the academic reports sent to the parents. Comments can be recorded at the following levels, and any comment can appear on an academic report:
Principal
Grade / Phase Head
Register Class Teacher
Tutor Group Teacher
Subject Class Teacher
Hostel Head
Sports
Interests
Extra-Mural Activities
A comprehensive facility allows the user to build up the rules behind the annual prize list. The system then analyses the data and produces the Prize Giving List.
Security Module
This module allows the administrator to limit what facilities are available to each person who has access to the system. In this way the entire system can be made available on a school network, and it is impossible for unauthorized access to be gained to sensitive data. Schools can identify a ‘hierarchy of authorities’. Each authority level defines the access rights a user has to certain aspects of the data.
Access rights can be defined at user group or user level. If a user is allocated to a group he automatically assumes the rights of that group until the administrator extends them within his own user rights definition.
Each user logs on under a unique username. Each user manages their own password. A system log records the actions of each user in a time stamped log.
Image Enabled
This facility enables one to store a scanned picture of each person defined in ProEd. When that person is referred to, their picture is displayed, so that the user has a visual check that the data being updated is against the correct person.
The concept of image enabling will be enhanced during the 2006 time frame, to allow all associated documents to be scanned and held in cross referenced files. Staff will be able to ask to see a document on-line by referring to the document’s reference number.
Fees Module
A comprehensive fee module allows an unlimited range of fee structures. It caters for differing fees dependent upon the number of children at the school. It also caters for fees dependent upon parent’s salary ranges. The fees module interfaces directly with Debtors and the EFT transfer system for handling debit orders via the Banks. For a single learner, any number of persons can be responsible for paying that child’s school fees. An individual debtor gets a consolidated statement covering all the learners at the school for whom they are paying the fees or part thereof. A debtor can be responsible for the fees of applicants, learners and past learners.
A comprehensive facility exists for defining exactly how a Fee is to be paid by a Debtor. The Fees module manages the injection into Debtors of these Fee items, so the Debtors Clerk does not have to physically enter the fees transactions every month. The system also caters for automatic Debit Order payments, with the generation of an EFT file in the format required by the banks.
Report Writer
The system contains many predefined reports from Class Lists, Voter’s Rolls through to Departmental Returns and Promotion Schedules. However, it is accepted that Users may need to generate lists of their own design. A simple Report Writer allows for this. The report writer provides facilities for designing simple lists, complex reports, labels and the import and export of data to packages such as Excel or MS Word.
Letter Module
This module allows the user to set up all of the school's standard letters in MS Word, and to then automatically generate any one of them from within the ProEd system. Every major screen in the system can be linked to an unlimited number of letter formats. The data associated with that screen is automatically ‘mail merged’ into those letters.
The letter module also allows one to hold a data base of all letters pertaining to a particular learner.
A 2006 development will be to image enable all correspondence. A letter will be scanned and held in a retrievable database.
The system is also fax, e-Mail and SMS compliant.
Assets Register
This module keeps track of the schools assets. The module is unique in that it caters for the situation within schools where many ‘like assets’ are found at the one location. For example a class room might have 25 identical chairs. This can be entered and maintained as one asset record. The module is identical to the stand alone system ProAssets.
Technical Overview of the ProEd Administration System
General
ProEd has been developed by ProGen a leading software design company based in Somerset West. The system design was agreed in consultation with the bursars and school administrators from 24 leading schools in the Western and Eastern Cape. The package caters for educational institutions from Pre-primary through to Tertiary. ProEd has been found to be equally at home in both the government and private schools.
The software was programmed by graduate computer scientists to rigorous development standards using a fourth generation language FlexGen. The software operates on all known open system networks. Currently, it is running on Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, Millenium, Novell and NT networks. FlexGen code can operate, unchanged, with data structures held in Oracle, Informix and Sybase databases. Interface modules between the FlexGen Cobol and the database of choice, are required. The FlexGen code can also operate after simple re-compilation on Unix, Windows 3.1 and DOS installations.
The package is fully 2000 compliant. It caters for the OBE and FET requirements as currently promulgated by the Department of Education, and will be maintained in accordance with any departmental requirements as and when they are gazetted.
The software has been specifically designed for the multi-lingual aspect of the Educational system. The data is language specific in that notices, letters and academic reports can be generated in the ‘language of choice’ of the recipient (eg Parent). The operation of the software is also language specific. A user can elect to operate the package in any of the official languages. Whilst under this mode, all screen text is displayed in the language of choice.
Time Saving
During the design stage, it was identified that most schools wasted an enormous amount of time transcribing data between various disparate computer systems and spread sheets. Within ProEd a data item is entered once. An amended data item immediately affects all other related data items and functions across the network.
Staff were found to spend on average 4 days per term calculating marks, and the results were estimated to be suspect in 50% of cases. In ProEd marks can be captured at test level. No staff member need do any calculation. No matter how complicated the marking structure, ProEd does every calculation required by the school and the department. The marks can be accumulated into any number of time periods with associated weighting factors. To date, no school has requested a marking structure that could not be accurately configured into ProEd.
Debtors staff were found to be spending inordinate amounts of time capturing and transferring data from disparate fees, debtors, EFT and General Ledger systems. ProEd allows for the setting up of any type of fee structure and associated payment method. The data automatically flows from Fees through Debtors, to the General Ledger, and an automatic file is created for input to the school’s EFT Bank update. ProEd is the only system, to our knowledge, that provides automatic fee allocation according to salary bands or means tests.
All schools on the ProEd system have a standard data interface that allows them to transfer a learner’s history between the schools. This transfer can be between any type of school.
At year-end, procedures allow the administrators to easily promote learners to the next grade and class. In one test, a 1200 learner school was promoted in 1 hour, and the associated class lists produced in the first day of the new year. The administrators can capture all applicants prior to the new academic year. If known, the next year’s structures in terms of classes, learners and subject choices can be configured before the close of the preceding year.
A unique WorkPad feature allows the administrator to identify any number of learners for a ‘repetitive task’. Any field in the system can be used to identify and gather the learners onto the WorkPad. Then, having done ‘The Task’ on one learner in the list, the WorkPad can be instructed to repeat the exercise for each nominated learner on the WorkPad list..
The data within ProEd is held in distinct Academic Years. Any number of years of history can be held on line. The user can refer back to any history year.
Any number of users can operate each module in parallel. Therefore one could have a term end scenario where marks are captured in parallel by the staff, and different grade academic reports are printed simultaneously on different printers on the network.
Reporting
The ProEd system contains many standard reports. It contains all the reports required by the Department of Education. Many of these reports do not fit onto standard A4 stationery. ProEd caters for schools that only have A4 printers by providing landscape and split-report printing options. In the latter, the wide printout is printed as two separate reports with an identical column on each. These can then be used to align the two reports into one perfect ‘wide’ report.
ProEd can print to any printer that has been configured within Windows. ProEd can also print to non-Windows compliant printers, provided their print control character sets are available.
Each data item that is available to a user for reporting purposes has been given a unique system number. A Report Writer facility allows the user to easily construct their own report formats by simply identifying the field numbers required on the report.
ProEd allows each school to design its own format of Academic Reports, Statements, On-Line receipts, Verification Reports and many more. Each school can have any number of the above formats. Standard layouts are provided as options within ProEd.
Security
The data security aspects within ProEd are very comprehensive. Apart from the standard installation fire-wall type security provided at the school, ProEd provides 5 additional layers of security within itself.
·Usernames & Passwords. Each user has a unique password and manages their own passwords. Every action of a user can be monitored by the system administrator.
·User Restrictions. Each user can be limited to specific functions and menus within the system, and to what other staff data they can view or edit.
·User Data Restrictions. Each user can be limited to whether he/she can read, update, insert only, into the data sets available to them.
·Data Structures. The data is distributed between many logical files. Therefore, in the unlikely event of security being breached, the user has only gained access to part of an array of inter-dependent data items. The data map is not defined within the run time system, and therefore users will find it impossible to re-construct data hierarchies.
·Compressed and Encoded Data. Depending upon the sensitivity of the data, various levels of encryption takes place.
For a more detailed look at any module of ProEd please click here.
