General thoughts on the state of BB K-12 EMS

Brian Hoyt

I got contacted by a school thinking about moving to BB and they wanted my thoughts. I thought they might be good for general discussion as well. I have been using and supporting BB products since 2000. EE/FE and RE and more recently the current K-12 product and RE:NXT. My school switched to current K-12 product in 2015. Anyway, here are some thoughts.

I can speak mostly of the admin side of BB for their Web/LMS/SIS product. I talk with the teachers but don't use the LMS as much myself. The main issue for me is that the BB interface has evolved very little since we got it in 2015. This is not to say it is bad, but it could use some enhancement. There are at least 3 different main platforms underneath with the BB platform.

1. https://fasps.myschoolapp.com/podium/ is the oldest platform and really clunky. There are no dynamic page refreshes, any updates require a full screen redraw. A lot of the grading setup pieces are still on this platform for example. Working on setting up criteria and report cards is painful due to this.
   
2. https://fasps.myschoolapp.com/app/ is previous platform. Like the one above it is locked to a width of about 1000 pixels. Everything is stuck in that format and has tons of wasted space on modern widescreen monitor. On this platform pages are able to refresh portions without a full page redraw. This was supposed to fully replace podium in later 2010's but they never finished that work before moving onto next platform.
   

2. https://fasps.myschoolapp.com/sis-scheduling/course-sections (as an example) these URL are specific to the function rather than being under a platform. These are the latest versions of pages and do use the full width, although maybe not always intelligently. You can see the header between the two shots, everything is more spread out mainly. Maybe 25% of the pages have been moved to this platform.
   

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In the broader sense the teacher / class web pages have also had very little functionality updates in the near decade we have been on the platform. One thing that drives our teachers nuts is the inability to trigger notifications on photo postings. There is a "news" widget that can alert parents to a post, but it can only have one thumbnail (100px) size photo. This means the teachers post to the photos widget and then additionally post to news widget. Some teachers are able to do pretty amazing things with the interface, but it isn't the friendliest or engaging.

Another challenge for me is exports and lists. BB here as well has an incomplete newer solution. There are old style lists that are basic or advanced. Basic lists are more canned where you can lightly change columns or filtering but can't do much. Advanced lists are literally SQL queries that you built via an interesting interface. The options for data are sort of a pyramid. You have to select the correct base item to even get the option for sub items. Then there is the new interface called Sky Lists. They are much more user friendly and flexible, but BB determines which fields are available and sometimes what you want isn't there so you must fall back to advanced lists.

Lauren Henderson

@Brian Hoyt
I would add to the Advanced List piece that since it is older, newer fields (like Household) are not available in the advanced list. I agree that robust, customizable reporting is a real challenge.

John Ronan

Knowing what [little, perhaps] I know about databases, it surprises me that SKY lists are so static. There's stuff called metadata in databases that lets one ask [and code] questions about the structure of the db.

I suspect this was used way back in EE as early as 2007, when I first saw it. Using this information, code for lists [as in EE queries] can present all the information about an object as something one can display. It wouldn't require a whole release.

My understanding might be simplistic, but, thank G-- there are Advanced Lists, which generally allow me to mine the data better and get what I need. [most of the time, except for the limitations mentioned by Lauren].

Jess Moxsky

@john ronan
I would cry tears of pure joy if I ever got back EE's querying capability in the K12 suite ?

Adrian Skrentny

@Jess Moxsky
I agree entirely. The ability to query a database is important. Most of the time I create a sky list (when possible) or an advanced list and then export and rework it in Google Sheets or Excel.