Your school software is the backbone of your daily operations. Your staff rely on it to complete their roles and provide the best educational experience. That’s why it’s so important to provide the right solutions to meet their needs.
However, it’s unlikely that one piece of software can provide all the functionality for all school departments. They each have different goals and priorities, and need software that offers features accordingly. This is particularly important when ensuring that you’re supporting teachers and students with the overall learning experience.
Your SIS is a vital piece of software and is the foundation for all other systems, but this wasn’t built with learning management in mind. There is a fundamental difference between these two types of software. So, what do you need to know and why does your school need both?
- LMS vs. SIS
- Flexibility
- Maximise efficiency
- More data for informed decision-making
- Streamline communication
- Homegnise school software
- iSAMS SIS and powerful integrations
LMS vs. SIS
In such a saturated space, it can be easy to get lost in all the available software solutions for schools. In fact, the software education market is predicted to reach a value of $11.6 billion by 2025. It seems like there’s a new EdTech innovation to stay on top of each day. This is especially true as the influence of AI continues to grow in the education sector.
Student Information Systems (SIS) and Learning Management Systems (LMS) are often confused, as the terms fundamentally seem so similar.
The primary difference between these two types of software is their goal and their user base. They serve different purposes for different members of staff and students.
An SIS is a foundational software for school operations. It’s typically primarily operated by school admin and IT staff. An SIS manages all areas of school life, from student data, course arrangement, disciplinary actions, medical data, examinations, school communications, and more.
However, an LMS offers the means to provide the education itself. These platforms can be driven by SIS data, but are created to deliver teaching materials, courses, assignments, and assessment details. Your teachers and students work with an LMS to track their progression and communicate about their education. These often have media features built in to enable a more engaging learning experience, and enable both parties to manage and track homework or assessments.
Both solutions are key to a school’s ability to run efficiently across all departments, while also delivering the best education. It’s important that both solutions meet the needs of your school and can work in tandem to support your performance.
Flexibility
Providing flexible options for learning ensures that your school can cater to a range of student needs, including learning styles and preferences. Online learning delivery systems also empower your school to offer a varied and accessible approach to learning thanks to their range of features.
The best LMS’ provide capabilities for a variety of media and extensive databases, enabling a creative learning environment that focuses on learning experiences rather than traditional classroom-based lessons. Schools and their teachers are more imaginative than ever as they strive to find ways to keep students engaged. A comprehensive LMS should support schools in this goal.
An LMS is also vital for schools that offer any kind of online learning, whether full distance learning or hybrid. Integration functionality can help to extend this further, using workspace tools like Microsoft Teams or Google Workspaces for file sharing and communication.
Maximise efficiency
When an SIS and LMS work in tandem, they can help your departments to reduce manual or time-consuming tasks and execute their duties much faster.
An SIS should supply the basis for your courses, classes, and enrolment. Integration with your LMS removes the need to form this foundation manually. You can work according to the most up to date data, ensuring accuracy within your course and lesson planning.
Enable your teachers to focus on crafting engaging learning experiences with a solution that empowers them to harness their skillset, rather than spend time filling out spreadsheets and managing databases.
Depending on your SIS functionality, this software should support departments across your school with a centralised hub of information, too. The iSAMS SIS offers systems and modules for all areas of school life, including finance, admissions, HR, communications, and more. Improving efficiency across your school with a cohesive suite of software helps to boost overall performance for the benefit of the entire school community.
More data for informed decision-making
Your senior leaders need to make decisions each day for the betterment of your school, whether for the learning experience, budget considerations, or growth plans. The data backing these decisions is the true driving force of school growth and performance. That’s why it’s so important that your software enables you to harness all the available data, as effectively as possible.
However, your school software also has vast databases of information – and not all of these are key data points for analytics. It’s important to have software that can turn data stores into palatable insights, enabling you to harness as much data as possible with as much clarity as possible.
Your SIS and LMS should work together to provide the most up to date information for your school analytics. These solutions might hold their own types of data, as mentioned above, but together can provide additional context to supply your reporting tools. With the key datapoints from your SIS and LMS, and a powerful BI reporting software, your school admin and leaders can truly see the bigger picture of performance at your school.
Streamline communication
As mentioned, your SIS should feed your LMS and vice versa. This data integration makes sharing key information and communicating important details across your school much more efficient.
Communication with your school community, whether your teachers, parents, admin staff, or students, is vital to keeping your school running smoothly. All parties need to be up to date on progress in order to keep moving forward and improving performance.
Your LMS holds information on student and course progress. The ability to share this information with those involved in a student's education is important for visibility and building informed approaches to education. Integrated parent, teacher, and student comms, thanks to comprehensive SIS and LMS data sharing, ensure a holistic effort to support each student's progress.
Homogenise school software
Comprehensive data integration between your LMS, SIS, and all other associated systems, ensures that everything is working together to power your school. Each department needs software that supports their daily tasks and their goals, but progress is lost when these systems are disparate.
The best school solutions work with API technology to create a network of systems that support each other and create a completely streamlined approach to school software. Ultimately, this benefits each department by providing software to meet their needs, while also enabling admin and leadership to work with less providers and one source of the truth.
However, the key benefit to an integrated, all-in-one approach to your SIS and related school software is that it puts security first.
For instance, a good relationship between your SIS and LMS should allow users to access both solutions with a single set of credentials. Single Sign-On functionality both streamlines the process for users and enhances security. Reducing the number of independent databases also reduces the risk of data breaches and the need to have security measures for each solution.
When providers work together, your school can work to build a better relationship and access resources and support from one place – rather than disorganised communications with too many suppliers.
iSAMS SIS and powerful integrations
iSAMS offers schools a range of solutions to manage all areas of school life. The goal of our software is to meet the needs of all those within a school community. That’s why we have created native solutions for admin, finance, HR, admissions, and more. However, we know that school software isn’t necessarily one-size-fits-all. You need to be able to build a network of systems that support your individual school.
That’s why we offer a comprehensive API that allows third parties to seamlessly integrate with the iSAMS SIS. With over 80 partners already on our marketplace, your school can build a truly unique solution.
If you’d like to learn more about what our SIS has to offer, access a demo below: