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The Data Analysis and Report Toolkit (DART) is a truly Open Source, feature-rich student information system (SIS) software package. In short, it is written in PHP, and runs on any web server with the free software combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP). DART is therefore free like a puppy! You can take it home with you, but care and feeding is something you must provide on your own, or contract with others to do for you.
The original mission for DART was the tracking and analysis of student progress on any set of learning standards. This role has since expanded to include all of the major student information data needs of a medium-sized, geographically distributed school district with around 2000 active students and 250 or more active certified staff members. The district is now entering its sixth full year of using DART with 17 facilities, including 15 K-12 schools, a regional pre-vocational facility and a district office.
DART is now a well-developed Student Information System (SIS) with many feature groups or "modules" to solve the major needs of a typical school district. Although DART is not right for every school district, it is rapidly gaining features and controls to make it more easily generalizable and customized for a typical district's needs.
The first "generalized" version of DART is being created with assistance from Carnegie Mellon University's Technology Consulting in the Global Community during the summer of 2011. Thanks to the CMU team, DART will now be easy for any typical school district to customize, install and maintain. Two brilliant and energetic consultants from CMU - Bolek Kurowski and Cristina Melo - are living in Unalakleet for the summer, and helping us make DART sustainable and generalizable. They have done an outstanding job analyzing DART's current status, mapping the system, identifying weaknesses and mapping out alternatives for DART as a sustainable Open Source project.
Unlike other student information systems, DART is completely learner-centered, not tied to staff or school schedules. It directly links to support materials for learning standards and benchmarks, and provides a intuitive interface for users. DART links relative student weaknesses directly to instructional resources in our MediaWiki-based curriculum system, and therefore permits teachers and administrators to plan for meaningful, dynamic instruction of any group of learners, as well as involve stakeholders in the building of curriculum. The curriculum system linked to DART is currently at over 14,500 pages, and has 8,600 files uploaded. The users themselves have populated the MediaWiki database.
To learn about using and working with DART, see the DART documentation available on Github.
For more information, see the tutorial and other wiki-based resources on our Github repository, or send us an jconcilus@bssd.org email.