We have a “School of Ministry” which typically has 50 or fewer students each semester. It is a very serious ministry for us and is a rather intense set of courses, but we still haven’t found a solid method of tracking grades.
We used to use Excel, but moved to some online tools, but they’ve all been either far too complicated or far too unreliable.
We may be expanding this school in a way that will require an actual school management system, but we’re probably still looking at 50 to 100 students per year max.
Any recommendations on software? Ideally something with support that is hosted in a reliable datacenter.
Have you looked into Moodle? It can be used to do a lot or a little. The University I work at has some courses entirely online with it. While others are setup just as a grade-book for in-person courses. The software itself is open source but they offer a hosted version of it for a fairly inexpensive price.
I wouldn’t recommend RenWeb to any greenfield deployment of my enemy given how bad they are about holding your info hostage, refusing to allow people to integrate with them, and really slow development pace.
You could see what schools in your area use, you may be able to subscribe to that system. Our private school uses ProgressBook, provided to schools in our area. Cost is on a per student per year basis. That gives us student information, grade-book, and attendance, plus a couple other features. You would get cloud based software, and backup/redundancy is handled by the provider.