Established in 1966, Munich International School is an independent IB World School located in Starnberg, Germany, catering for students aged 3-16.
Munich International School has more than 50 years of success in education, offering a holistic, value-based curriculum to support each of their students.
Why did you start looking for a new MIS?
When I arrived here at MIS, it was a desire from the school to make a change. We were using an older system which wasn’t really allowing us to expand into our use of other systems. The connections to other software that support the learning and the institution were not really possible. We were having to really shove a square peg into a round hole to make it work.
Watch the Q&A with Munich International School
Watch the Q&A with Munich International School
We spoke to Daragh Comerford, Director of Learning Technologies at Munich International School, to find out about their experiences with iSAMS and our range of modules.
We wanted a solution that was much more web-based, had a much more open approach to API and we were looking for a fresh start really. That was my remit when I arrived.
How did you find working with your project manager and implementing iSAMS?
Munich International School is quite a large school, with 1300 students, and implementation was very successful but also complicated. It took time. My experience is with similar sized schools, it really takes time.
Our experience was positive. We had experts in-house as well, which is also helpful, but definitely a process that we didn’t want to rush.
What was your experience of the training offered by iSAMS?
In general, we were fully complimented with our training. My advice to any school is to continue training because the software constantly changes. Even now there’s new features that I’m not on top of. Keep a training budget in mind so that you don’t always have to deliver the training yourself and you can lean on resources in iSAMS.
“When doing our research, we realised that schools using bits of iSAMS and larger bits of other systems had more tensions because of the amount of data passing between systems. We decided to really use a lot of the core modules of iSAMS and use one system, and not try to plug in multiple big systems. That’s been quite successful.“
What parts of iSAMS support have you found most helpful?
I advise other schools to create a budget for their reports so when people start asking for custom fields or reports, then you can quickly outsource that to iSAMS at a reasonable cost. They’re much quicker at producing the report for you rather than always having to do everything in-house.
I also used the iCommunity site to post a position for the school and I was able to advertise to iSAMS data managers around the world. Thankfully we had applications from that and that was a really good way of recruiting a data manager who had loads of experience and I didn’t have to go out to market and try to explain what iSAMS was. I got an expert already.
We were very confident on launch. In fact, it was not a very stressful launch. I was quite relaxed because the software had been working for several months before, without anyone knowing.