Driving Schools to Automation through Kimkëlen Software

The aim of this paper is to introduce Kimkëlen, a student information system -SIS- that allows educational institutions to automate its managements processes in a simple, practical and audited way. This software has been developed to meet the needs of pre-university level schools of Universidad Nacional de La Plata and Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. Released to open source community in 2013 under GNU GPL v2.0, Kimkëlen was built on the premise that each school usually has its own teaching scheme following different rules, therefore the level of adaptation and customization had to be high. After deployment of Kimkëlen it was demonstrated that the best way to create, improve, expand and integrate spaces related to school administration is through their computerization. Management of the schools where it was implemented were potentially improved in several ways and after surveying users the results were encouragingly positive. Kimkëlen helps educational institutions to evolve into a new model that goes after bases adopted by modern organizations.