SOA and SaaS for Education
A subject that I’d love to see discussed more is the role that SOA can play in education, specifically elementary education. Our schools have to make increasing use of technology, yet they certainly can’t afford to spend a lot of money on it. How can SOA play a role in allowing elementary schools to get the most from their technology dollars?
One good thing is that the standardization that has brought about the emphasis on SOA in the corporate world will likely lower the cost of technology for schools. Continued advances in SaaS capabilities should certainly allow many of the administrative functions to be handled through a web-based provider. If SMBs can utilize salesforce.com for CRMs, there’s no reason why there can’t be a schoolforce.com for elementary school administration (except that schoolforce.com is already claimed by SportPal Team Management- we’ll come up with a better name).
My father-in-law is the principal of a K-8 private elementary school. Unlike private colleges, private elementary schools face significant challenges, and he has to utilize every grant and donation, no matter how small. The administrative challenges of this are daunting. It’s not simply about having an online grade book available. They need to keep detailed records regarding student attendance, paid lunch counts (versus kids who bring their lunch), etc. and report it on a regular basis to the authorities that administer the grants. I’m sure this is just the tip of the iceberg. I’m sure technologies used for inventory management could be applied to collect student data in real time, and then send that information to a web service exposed by the grant authorities, eliminating a lot of the paperwork associated with the effort.
Beyond SOA, I think schools can also leverage the social networking technologies associated with Web 2.0. After all, what elementary school doesn’t have a parents’ organization? I’m still disappointed that some open source group hasn’t created a complete school intranet with LAMP and made it freely available.
Are there other more philanthropic uses of SOA? Leave a comment or trackback with your thoughts.
2 Responses to “SOA and SaaS for Education”
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It can be hard to find direct sources of government grants, let alone a source that would actually consider your appplication. Recently I found a few websites that lay it all out for you, all the sources, websites and telephone numbers you need to apply to numerous agencies that offer any type of grants. I also found a great resource that takes you by the hand and tells you how to write the perfect grant application. You can check it out here:
http://www.governmentgrantsinc.com
[…] I’ve previously blogged about SOA for schools (here and here). My father-in-law is a grade school principal, so I have the occasional conversation about the use of technology in school administration. Your average school is not going to be able to invest in BizTalk or any other orchestration engine, yet, as the example calls out, there’s certainly opportunities to apply orchestration. What this strategy really is a competitor to is something like Yahoo Pipes. There’s probably a broad market where significant efficiency gains can be made, but the cost of the infrastructure is not worth the investment. Is a school really going to buy BizTalk to automate a workflow that maybe occurs once or twice a year (depending on where you live)? No. This seems much better suited to a pay-per-use model. In this manner, the provider of the hosted workflow can have many, many workflows, any one of which is used infrequently at best. Think of it as the long tail of workflow. This model actually makes some sense to me. What are your thoughts? […]