Music Teacher's Office End to End Coninuted Part II

As promised I will continue the discussion about Music Teacher's Office. Today I will elaborate on the problems that we wanted to solve as well as the problems encountered devising the solution.

As it became clear that what we needed was real time information about the students status and progress to be made available to all the relevant players, administrators, teachers, parents and students. Administrators, parents and teachers needed to know if the student they were teaching had actually paid for the lesson. Administrators needed to know what lessons had been taught to quickly and accurately calculate payroll. Students needed to know what their lesson assignment was, when their next lesson is and dates of recitals. Administrators also needed a way of monitoring what was actually being taught so as to be able to help with improving the quality of the lessons being taught. All this needed to be done in a fashion that was easy to use and actually improved efficiency in the business flow.

The only way to achieve this was to set up a computer network where the teachers and the administrations were all working off the same page at the same time. We needed a database placed on a server with all the information and a Windows application on each computer on the network that would access and update the data in real time for all to share.

Another major problem was getting the information to the parents. If you have ever taught in the schools or elsewhere for any length of time you quickly become aware of the fact that getting information home to the parents is a monumental task. Kids just don't communicate with their parents. You can't rely on kids taking information home especially the important stuff. When teaching in the schools as a band director for years the only thing I could really count on when I needed to contact a parent was to pick up the phone. But now with email it is very easy to fire off an email and you can almost be sure that it gets to the right party. So we knew that email had to be a part of the communication equation.

Scheduling teachers, rooms, and lesson times that is in constant flux was another major challenge that music schools encounter. When we were scheduling with pencil and paper there was always room for error and there always were errors. But with the computer we could set things up to eliminate most of these errors. Now it goes without saying that no systems is completely bullet proof but what we ended up with at least gave us a warning that our human errors might result in problems.

Creating flexibility in scheduling for different music studios and schools also presents many problems since no school or teacher works in the same way. Each school or studio teaches on different days of the week, different times, different instruments, lesson lengths, charge different tuition amounts, maybe different amounts for each teacher. They pay the teachers in different ways. Music Teacher's Office addresses all these factors and more and allows each school to customize how they do business.

Since many talented students take lessons from more than one teacher during the same session the system needed to be able to provide for multiple registrations for each student.

Scheduling group lessons could be problematic as the studio needed to take into account the number of students that would be allowed in a particular studio at one time not to mention registering, scheduling and invoicing.

Another problem that needed be addressed was that from year to year schedules changed, tuition amounts changed and if you needed to take registrations for the next term while still working in the current year the system needed to be able to work in one or more schedules or years at the same time.

The quality of education in the school being provided was also a concern and by having access to all the lesson assignments given by the teachers to the students could also be a great problem solver. Being able to track the students assignments could be a great tool in helping teachers that were having problems with students and addressing possible problems before they happened.

Having this digital log of assignments and student progress also provides a selling point when selling lessons or when having disagreements with parents or students if they challenge whether a lesson was actually taught or not.

Securing parent and student information was a prime concern as well. In todays world of the internet keeping customer personal information secure is a legal obligation and if not handled properly could be a disaster for any business including small music studios and private teachers. Originally I had entertained the idea of making this a web based application but finally leaned toward a more cautious approach by keeping the data on the schools local area network or computer rather than on a web server. Now in this day and age nothing is really secure but keeping personal data of parents and students off the web greatly reduces the chance of security breaches and puts the responsibility of security on to each individual school and teacher. This spreads any potential risk out to smaller entities rather than having the data of thousands of schools, teachers, parents and students in one place. Even though a web application would have been more flexible in some ways a local database is far more secure and I feel a better solution than keeping data on a web server. Especially when dealing with kids.

Music Teacher's Office - End to End

Over the next few weeks or so I am going to cover Music Teacher's Office from the beginning to end. From is birth out of necessity to the features, benefits and best practices on its use. So to keep this organized I will start with an outline of topics.

1. How and why it all started
2. The Problem(s)
3. The Solutions(s)
4. Setting Defaults Nity Grity
   
5. Best Practices - Administrators
6. Best Practices - Teacher
7. Recap
   

How and why this all started

Since 1992 my wife and myself have been running Weed Music ltd which is a music retail store and large music school. Around 1998 - 1999 it became apparent that there had to be a better way to run a large music school. We needed a tool that not only kept all of our ducks in a row business wise but actually and a positive impact on the quality of teaching in our school.

Up until 1998 we had created a great school manual that laid out procedures for registrations, invoicing and lesson forms and life was good.

We did very well with pencil and paper for registrations and had an easy to use multiple copy registration form that gathered all the parent and student information and an area where to record payments. We created multiple copy lesson assignment forms to record weekly assignments so that one copy stayed in the lesson log book to calculate pay and the other went with the student. The system worked great about 65% of the time but there were a lot of cracks in the system where a lot of tasks and information could fall through.

When we started to get a large number of students and teachers using the system these cracks became larger and larger.

How it worked was this way. When a payment for lessons was recorded to the registration form and then we added corresponding lesson assignment sheet to the teachers lesson assignment binders so the teacher knew that the lessons were paid for and they were not teaching for free. The registrations form worked great until you had a payment or check go bad or had a student cancel lessons. If a check went bad and for some reason you forgot to pull the lesson sheets out of the teachers binder or could not because the teacher was using it at the time the student could walk in and take the lesson without it being paid for.

So that in a long story is the problem. What the administration and staff really needed was real time information about the status of the student. This was just not possible with pencil and paper.

So with that revelation I went looking for software. I looked at a couple of systems that were tied to music retail software and they did nothing for scheduling, or recording student assignments or achievements not to mention teacher payroll. I spent a lot of time surfing the net and trade shows and found nothing that would work the way I felt it needed to. This was about the time I was spending a lot more time on the computer and I found a book called VB6 Databases published by Wrox. Well, that was it. I had taken a basic computer programming course in my last year at the University of Montana and this book refreshed my zeal for coding. I knew then that I had to create my own Windows application to solve my problems. In about 1992 I made the step up to VB.NET in Visual Studio 2002 and never looked back.

So I guess thats how this journey began. We had a problem that needed a solution that did not exist until now.

Next time I will elaborate on the problems.