Student Information System

A student information system (SIS) is the authoritative database that stores every official record about a student — demographics, enrollment, attendance, grades, disciplinary history, and transcripts — and serves as the source of truth for accreditors, regulators, universities, and parents. Every other piece of school software (LMS, library, fees, hostel, transport) integrates with the SIS for roster and grade data.

PowerSchool and Infinite Campus are proprietary K-12 SIS vendors that license per student (typically $8-$20 per student per year), run cloud-only, and do not expose source code. OpenEduCat is LGPLv3 open-source with no per-student licensing, self-hostable on your own infrastructure, and ships with full source code. Districts keep data-residency control (important for FERPA reviews in US, GDPR in EU, and national data-sovereignty rules elsewhere) and redirect license spend toward teaching resources. PowerSchool and Infinite Campus are purpose-built for US K-12 state reporting; OpenEduCat covers K-12, colleges, and universities in one platform with Ed-Fi, OneRoster, NAAC, NBA, ENQA, and AACSB report templates included.

Yes. This is a primary reason institutions choose OpenEduCat. Download the Community Edition, run it on your VPC, district data center, or sovereign-region cloud (AWS Frankfurt, Azure India, GCP Sydney). Every byte of student data stays under your institution's control. FERPA, GDPR, UK DPA, India DPDP, and national data-sovereignty rules are all satisfiable when you, not a vendor, decide where the database lives.

Yes. OpenEduCat exposes LTI 1.3 and OneRoster APIs. LTI pushes course rosters to Moodle, Canvas, Blackboard, or Schoology and pulls graded assignment scores back into the SIS gradebook. OneRoster syncs student, teacher, and class data in the standard format K-12 assessment and LMS vendors expect. No manual CSV cycles.

Education groups with 5-50+ campuses run every campus as its own legal entity (company) inside one installation. Each campus has isolated student data, its own chart of accounts, and its own policies, but the group chair, CFO, and operations director see consolidated dashboards. Inter-campus student transfer carries the full record in one workflow instead of 10 days of manual emails. Running 12 campuses on one install costs roughly the same as 2 separate installations, and the consortium reporting only exists in the unified model.

Yes, when properly deployed. Role-based access, immutable audit logs, configurable retention policies, and consent tracking are standard. US districts configure FERPA directory-information and disclosure rules in admin settings. EU institutions self-host in EU regions for GDPR residency and configure data-subject request workflows. UK, India, Australia, and Canada all map similarly to the same controls. OpenEduCat does not sell student data — there is nothing to sell, because there is no vendor-side data pool.

An SIS is narrower — the authoritative student record system. An education ERP is broader: SIS plus fees, HR, library, hostel, transport, and operations, often with general-ledger accounting. Most institutions buy one platform covering both. OpenEduCat is architected as an education ERP (built on Odoo's ORM) with openeducat_core as the SIS at its heart. Institutions deploy only the modules they need.