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Author Topic: Grades (year) and classes - Using CiviCRM for schools  (Read 471 times)

andersiversen

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Grades (year) and classes - Using CiviCRM for schools
March 09, 2015, 09:28:23 am
Hi there

I write this to hear from other CiviCRM users, who works with schools, how they organize grades and classes.
I'll start and tell you how we have organised it in my organization.

In my organisation we have about 150 (member) high schools, and each school has grades (as in first, 2nd and 3rd year) and classes (usually assigned a letter eg. a, b, x or y).

To keep track of which class and grade a student is in I've chosen to use groups. So there's a group for each school, and each school group has sub groups for each grade, and each grade group has sub groups for the classes. All students are also related to their school, so I do use relationships, but not for the hierarchy of grades and classes.

Pros:
- groups support nesting
- it's easy to search
- send email to a school/grade/class
- keep track of when a student was added/removed
Cons:
- There's a lot of groups!
- unlike relationships and events, you cannot set a start and end date beforehand

So how have you done it, and why?

Is support for this kind of structuring of your contacts in civi, something you would like to see as an extension?

Coleman Watts

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Re: Grades (year) and classes - Using CiviCRM for schools
March 09, 2015, 09:37:19 am
Our school does not use Civi to store which student is enrolled in which class. As you noted there is no good data model for this in Civi core. Developing an extension for it would be cool - probably the extension could use custom data as the data model and then present a user-friendly way to enter and search that data. IMO custom data is probably a better base than either groups or events, but it depends on your specific use-case.

Our school does use Civi to store and print transcripts - both interim and final. The way we do this is:
  • Multi-record custom data for each student
  • One record per class - fields are course title, teacher name, grade, teacher comments
  • I wrote a little custom code to bring this data (nicely formatted) into a token.
  • A couple pdf templates - one for "official transcript" that includes the school logo and course grades with no teacher comments, one for the "narrative transcript" that we give to families.

Note that the course title is just a free text field. There just wasn't a great way to structure this data as course titles keep changing from year to year.
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petednz

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Re: Grades (year) and classes - Using CiviCRM for schools
March 09, 2015, 12:36:50 pm
Interesting question. Have just come back from DrupalSouth - where Drupal in Education was a discussion (well actually Drupal in Universities) - and I came away thinking more about civi as the CRM partner to some of the use cases.

In the areas like this where we have tended to use Relationships - partly because of Eileen's work to make ACLs run off permissioned relationships - and hence a teacher can be limited to 'just' their students using the Relationship, and a 'year dean' if you have such things (ie a teacher that has a higher role across a whole year) can have access to all those year students, using a simple 'tree' model such as below

School - has relationship to - Years

Years - has relationship to - Classes

Classes - has relationship to - students

and then

Head teacher - has relationship to - school - and hence sees everyone

Form teacher - has relationship to - Years - and hence sees everyone in that year

Class teacher - has relationship to - Class(es) - and hence sees only students in their class(es)

I am not advocating you use the above, just floating it as a concept that I think can help in similar situations.

It does mean you can set end dates etc, see history, and other relationship goodies.
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petednz

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Re: Grades (year) and classes - Using CiviCRM for schools
March 09, 2015, 03:10:42 pm
and fyi - another 'gain' we get from relationships is that we use Drupal Views to show teachers their class lists, and then a bunch of links from that to various webforms to update their data

so the view then is built off
- Contextual Filter = logged in user
and a bunch of View Relationships to get the people who are related to the 'class/year' and can daisy chain those relationships if required.
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pete davis : www.fuzion.co.nz : connect + campaign + communicate

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  • CiviCRM Community Forums (archive) »
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  • Support »
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  • Grades (year) and classes - Using CiviCRM for schools

This forum was archived on 2017-11-26.