Master’s Academy & College
Education pioneer sees Microsoft .NET future to help students excel
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Company Overview
Master’s Academy & College, based in Calgary, Alberta, opened its doors in 1997 and now has a total of 600 students. The vision of the school is about creating Profound Learning, a 21st century model for value-based education. Profound Learning aims to exceed all the current standards set by Alberta Education, and to equip students as knowledge workers with skills to enable them to succeed in an ever-changing world. Integral to the Master’s philosophy is a commitment to technology. As such the school has a better than 2:1 student to computer ratio with 300 desk top units and 50 laptops all running the Windows 2000 operating system. These client computers are all networked around several network servers running Windows 2000 Advanced Server to provide file sharing, email and high-speed Internet connectivity for every student from every computer.
Business Challenge
Aside from the school’s commitment to technology, what makes the school different, and what it considers one of its key methods in producing superior students is the Master’s assessment system. In a nutshell, benchmarks are set to establish a basic quality standard for student work.
Bonus marks are available for exceeding the quality standard (EQS) but penalties are also applied if, for example, work is handed in late. If a student submits unsatisfactory work, then the teacher will not accept it. Students are expected to rework their assignments until the quality standard is met. The philosophy of this method reflects the school’s belief that every student can produce quality work.
Master’s students are encouraged to produce quality work handed in on time and, whenever possible, to exceed the quality standard.
The problem Master’s faced with its marking system was that there were several criteria to be recorded and blended before an assignment’s final mark could be reached: the quality grade and any EQS bonuses or penalties. What it produced for school administrators was a vast amount of data that had to be collated before each and every grade could be calculated.
They were using a basic database and spreadsheet system, but the solution was cumbersome. It was awkward to enter and interpret the data, because the system was not designed for the Master’s model. They needed a more robust, scaleable and tailored solution. Having looked across the market for the newest and most powerful technology the school chose Microsoft’s .NET platform.
Solution
An early solution to the problem was tried in a prototype form using Microsoft’s Excel spread sheet system. This allowed teachers to compute the final mark based on all of the criteria, but it was extremely cumbersome. This prototype was refined for two years until all the parameters of the assessment system were in place.
EDS Canada in Calgary was called in at this stage to develop and install a customized system. This was achieved using the Microsoft .NET platform with the specific implementation of a SQL ServerTM 2000 database, and the creation of a user interface using the beta stage Visual Studio development system .NET software suite. More specifically, the interface was developed using the Visual Basic 6.0 development system and JavaScript languages. To ensure that there was teacher-only secure access to the network, existing Windows 2000 Active Directory director service authentication was used. Report cards will soon be generated as PDF files using Crystal Decisions, Crystal Reports to create a read-only document for students and parents to see.
The N-Tier architecture was a natural choice for the Master’s project as it offered a strong solution based on the client/server program model. This distributed computing model is part of the fundamental basis of the .NET platform for delivering Web services. This architecture enables application programs to be distributed across three or more disparate computers or servers in a distributed network environment. In this environment, user interface programming is done on the individual user’s computer, business processes are done on a centralized computer and data that is needed is stored on a database managed by an alternate computer.
By utilizing the N-Tier architecture, Master’s is able to take advantage of a network in which any one tier can run the appropriate operating system platform or processor and can be updated separately without disrupting any of the other tiers. This ensures that any upgrades to the network that occur, happen seamlessly without compromising the performance of the network.
N-Tier was also an obvious choice to avoid the problem of having a solution directly connected to the database. That arrangement creates data bottlenecks when too much data tries to pass through. Using N-Tier means that if the school should decide to modify its network, then the entire system will not need to be extensively revamped, but scaled to need. The architecture of the complete solution allows teachers to easily implement the schools unique marking system, while leaving it flexible enough for a wide variety of web service expansions.
Business Benefits
The objective of a school is not to make money. Master’s goals are qualitative, not quantitative: the number of students produced is not as important as the quality of each student. In this objective Master’s differs from a traditional business, because it could enroll an endless number of students and still fail in its mission.
Where Master’s is exactly like a modern business is in concern for lost time. The .NET platform is going to help the school outpace other school’s by allowing it to know in advance which students needs more assistance in a specific area:
“Typically you go for a teacher parent interview after 3-4 months of school. You go in and they say that Johnny is not working up to his potential. You don’t know where the missing piece is. You’d liked to have seen something happen 3 months ago, but nobody knew what was happening. What we’re looking at is the timeliness of relevant information being captured and presented, and that doesn’t happen in education,” says Rudmik.
Now with the .NET platform installed Master’s can know immediately when a block occurs in a child’s learning, because the data of a student’s learning curve is gathered in real time from each classroom and stored in the schools central database. Soon, this information will lose no time being transmitted to parents, instead of taking several months before the next parent night.
Rudmik calculates that 98 per cent of the school’s parents have home Internet access. In the near future parents and students will be able to access from home a continually updating report card, so that all parties can know how a child is progressing at any given time. The advantage is that no time is lost to get on top of a problem before it becomes so overwhelming that the class leaves a student behind.
Once the system is connected to the web, Master’s hopes to employ the Web Services aspect of its data collection to report to Alberta Learning, the province’s board of education in Edmonton, continuously and in real time. At the moment the school reports electronically and infrequently using a cumbersome system. Reporting will become an easy, automatic and continually updated method, all of which grows naturally out of the robust, flexible and scalable platform provided by Microsoft’s .NET platform.
Resulting Value
Installing the .NET platform has allowed Master’s Academy & College to move from a difficult system which was troublesome for the teachers to use to allowing the school to have a ticket to the coming Web Services revolution. Says Rudmik, “It was cumbersome process with the amount of information, data, the process, and the problems. It was a complex system we had built. It was beyond typically what spreadsheets are used for. We brought in the .NET platform, and it solved that one side, but it also gave us the capacity to build toward our vision of real time reporting.”
Solving that problem also opens new possibilities: soon it will be able to immediately communicate its findings to all parties; and it positions this forward-looking school to being fully ready for connecting to the world beyond Calgary, Alberta.
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