What is Kuali Student?
We’re a consortium of universities committed to creating a next generation student system that will surpass the capabilities available today. Kuali Student is centered on the needs of students: helping them set educational goals, anticipating their information needs, suggesting options, and simplifying their administrative tasks. Students, faculty, and institutions will benefit from our new, flexible approach to dealing with curriculum change and tomorrow’s dynamic learning environment.
Our team will deliver a flexible, scalable, cost-effective system that can be configured to meet the business requirements of your institution. We will do this by developing a full service-oriented architecture implemented through Web Services, and by engaging the community in the process of design and development.
Our modular, open source, standards-based design enables integration and interoperability with existing commercial and open source applications. In other words, you can install as many or as few Kuali Student modules as your specific needs require. And new applications can be built that extend Kuali Student functionality.
Kuali Student will achieve sustainability through community source distribution and widespread adoption.
Why are we building this?
Institutions have increasingly complex needs.
When contemplating new student systems, or while maintaining what they have, universities and colleges face increasing costs and complexity. Over time educational institutions have become larger and more diverse, offering an increasing number of interdisciplinary programs, often with other institutions on multiple campuses across town, if not around the world.
We need a time saving, cost effective solution.
As universities grow, they require flexible and scalable student systems that will allow them to manage an increasingly dynamic learning environment, while at the same time reducing the administrative burden on faculty and staff, and providing high levels of support to students and other users.
We need to customize our system.
When colleges and universities consider their options for future student systems – whether home-grown, commercial, or open source – they find the choices are limited. Kuali Student will add an array of options for administrators, with either individual modules or a full-function student system. And unlike most current generation systems, Kuali Student can be adapted to your needs, rather than requiring your institution to change its practices to match pre-set software specifications.
Our collaborative and open source Kuali Student Services System will meet the demands of the next generation.
Open Source, Community Source
Kuali Student is building a community of interest within higher education that includes universities, colleges, international institutions, and vendors. This partnership will sustain future maintenance, enhancement, and development of the Kuali Student product. We will establish procedures and standards for development that can be used by us all to extend the core functionality and integrate commercial packages.
The benefits of joining the Kuali Student community are clear:
- Shared Resources – more efficient development
- Innovation – institutions share ideas and solutions, leveraging their own experiences
- Functionality – direct input into functions and features
- Support – commercial partners for implementation & support are encouraged
- Future Flexibility – the Kuali Student community can ensure sustained development