[seul-edu] Open Admin for Schools Feedback/Question

[Les Richardson <richl@mail.tfsd.sk.ca>]

Hi All,

I'm wrapping my head around the problem of creating report cards for the
Open Admin system. I'm trying to create a system that is quite general in
scope and relatively easily customized. There is a trade off since trying
to be all things to all people will generally fail and it might be better
to create simpler code that is easier to customize for specific needs,
rather than create gigantic code to cover all possible cases.

This leads to my question:

How many "terms" or sections of a school year throughout the world in
schools of users on this list?  I'm planning for either 3 or 4 terms per
school year. Are there others? (ie. a lot of others?)

Since this system reports on attendance as part of the report card, I have
to slice the school year up into terms, calculate the number of school days
per term, and then check this against student records to generate stats.
However this leads to the problem of how many terms to allow for in laying
out the report in a table format since normally one wants to go across:

Attendance   Term 1    Term 2    Term 3, etc. How far to go....


This is also a problem for reporting subjects since we again would like to
go across the page with the different term values:

Science   Term 1   Term 2    Term 3

and different numbers of terms require different table layouts.  I was
going to stick with options for 3 or 4, but what are the needs?


Les Richardson
H. Hardcastle School
Edam, Sk. Canada