OSIS (Open Student Information System) is a lightweight and yet highly scalable system to manage the core business of higher education institutions. It is free and open source under the terms of GPL v3 public license, aligned with the strong spirit of knowledge sharing and collaboration of the community. The project is funded by Université catholique de Louvain in the context of its long term goal of modernizing its information systems towards the next generation of students, devices, practices and technologies.

By using OSIS, a higher education institution is able to maintain, control and monitor the entire student’s career, from the admission to the diploma and all information orbiting this fundamental process, such as planning the academic year, managing partnerships with other institutions for exchange and mobility programs, assigning teachers to courses and courses to students, etc. At the current stage, OSIS is designed to fulfill UCL’s needs, but it can be properly adapted to fulfill more needs coming from other institutions interested in joining the project.

Offering a reusable system is not the only advantage of being open source. It also means:

  • fully transparent operations for the entire academic community;
  • inspiration for entrepreneurs to build integrated services that may be, at some point, incorporated into OSIS;
  • empowering departments, endowed with the necessary expertise, to develop extensions to fulfill their particular needs;
  • opportunity for students looking for a job, but with no previous experience, to participate in a real world project;
  • reduced maintenance cost for the University thanks to the range of reliable open source products required by the system, such as the web server Apache, the database PostgreSQL and the web framework Django.

This website aims to keep you informed about the evolution of OSIS and share the knowledge acquired during the course of the project. Please, don’t hesitate to contact the team in case you have any question.