Both PosiEd and Salesforce Education Cloud are designed with one primary purpose in mind: to put the student first and foremost.
To that end both architectures are designed to provide immense levels of flexibility and detail to support even the most complex multi school, multi campus environments. In many SIS applications, offering students flexibility to do things like enroll in more than one campus at a time, to move between classes without interrupting academic assessment, to provide innovative course structures such as IIB and RTO in addition to HSC etc., have all come with the price of compromise when it comes to the architecture and storage of records on those students. Many schools often resort to notes and separate applications to keep track of the sometimes complex details.
PosiEd and Education Cloud are designed to cater for as many of these challenges as possible. With this in mind, please understand that as you review the architecture some of the reasoning behind certain architectural choices may not immediately appear obvious. This can be part of the challenge of providing a highly flexible student record keeping architecture that will accommodate even the most complex school environments and unique needs.
With this in mind, let's consider how we create the records necessary to enroll and manage a student in the PosiEd Environment.
Below is a slightly stylized ERD of a typical student. Note that it does not include capabilities that are delivered on top of the standard PosiEd and K-12 applications such as well-being, academic assessments, etc. At this point, we are just reviewing the core requirements.
The students and their Family
The first and most obvious record is the student’s Person Account record. Here you will populate the student's primary contact details. Note that you do not yet have to specify anything related to items such as their grade level. house, etc. This will come later.
The second step is to create Person Account records for their family and carer contacts. These can be associated with the student contact via Contact/Contact Relationships. Review how relationships are to be optimally configured. How the cascading of contact details will work and how data import of these relationships can occur?
Billing Account
A Billing Account record should then be established. This is an account of type Billing Account and this is the level at which all billing for one or more students to a single bill payer is made. It is also the point at which contract associations, etc., are made.
Once the Billing Account record has been created, link the Student Account record link to the Billing Account. [Under Development]
Academic Term Enrollments
An Academic Term Enrollment associates a student with a particular Academic Term. While some information about a student's enrollment history with an educational institution is held by the Student Record, this object is not granular enough for academic term/grade level analysis. Academic Term Enrollments are typically also used to drive enrollment billing functions.
Each year, the student should have a new Academic Term Enrollment record created for them and these records will also consequently be associated with Course Offering Participant records, which in turn are associated with Cohort Members.
Other Accounts Record Types
PosiEd and EDC require a number of account record types to be configured, including Grade Levels, House, Tutor/Roll Group and so on. (there are others such as Department Educational Institution, etc., but these are not relevant for this discussion)
A common question as is - Why are these entities set up as Accounts as opposed to simple pick lists? The reason is that Account relationships provide a more flexible and long-term recording of various associations. It allows you to, for example, see that a student moved from one Roll Group to another which is something that you can't see with just a picklist.
These associations also provide better reporting such as generating the Program Term Application Timeline (PTAT) reports. Note review this.
These Account records need to be set up prior to establishing Student Records and Academic Term Enrollments.