Marshall Islands EMIS Foundation Work

Marshall Islands EMIS Foundation Work

  • 8:19 a.m.

This projects consist in layout the foundation for a professional national education management information system (EMIS) in the Marshall Islands (RMI)

Project Details

Name of assignment or project: Marshall Islands EMIS (MIEMIS) Foundation Work
Year: 2016
Location: Marshall Islands
Client: Public School System (PSS), Ministry of Education
Main project features: Adopt and customize a flexible Pacific EMIS, improve data management, improve monitoring and evaluation processes
Positions held: Senior Programmer, Data Analyst, Trainer, MIS Expert,
Activities performed: technical skills evaluation, training workshop, thorough needs analysis, built prototype data model, adopted Pacific EMIS to RMI, contributed missing features to EMIS, deployed new EMIS, developed eSurvey technology to collect all necessary data for core key education indicators agreed by stakeholders, test import of eSurvey into EMIS database for further processing and analysis, improved collaborative effort in development of Pacific EMIS, develop M&E component

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Project Deliverables Summary

The consultant was tasked with adapting a Pacific Education Management Information System (EMIS) approved and supported by Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) to the needs of the RMI. The following summarizes what was achieved.

Extensive Training on various aspects of this project including data modeling and management, systems/network/security administration and information management user processes.

Improved Organization Processes related to the collection, processing, management, analysis, and dissemination of information.

Data Cleanup A lot of the past data was cleaned up to the extend possible and organized into the new Marshall Islands EMIS (MIEMIS) system. This provides a form of archival of past effort into the new system.

Multi-Stakeholder/Country National Education Data Management Project While SPC’s initiative to support a Pacific EMIS for small island nations is a great concept, a number of important components are still missing for such an ambitious initiative (This is not to criticize SPC, it is merely an aspect of a young initiative). Notably, the EMIS software project(s) did not have the required components of a typical sustainable collaboration project helping to manage growing complexity: they were mostly “single man” efforts with little technical documentation and other collaboration tools making it hard for anyone to join efforts. Several of these important missing components were developed including extensive guides for software developers, systems administrators and users. Rigid software development processes were put in place to coordinate the complexity of developing software as a team. And a number of tools and approaches are being evaluated to improve on-going collaboration.

Deploy an Adaptation of the Pacific EMIS The core of the TOR was to adapt the Pacific EMIS to RMI’s needs and this was achieved. The software project is young but already offers most core features we had committed to. The advantage of the vision of a single flexible EMIS designed for the Pacific nations is that efforts into any country will propagate to all the adopting countries with only small marginal effort.

Further develop existing Pacific EMIS Project Well engineered projects start with good planning and the development of a comprehensive requirements engineering document 2. This document is what guides the on-going development of the system to meet stakeholders’ needs. The Pacific EMIS that was adopted is a young “project” but its “foundation” is built on a data model and system developed and refined to the Pacific needs throughout more than a decade. One can think of this system as a gold mine of education data management knowledge that we can now mine and benefit from. This is what we have been doing, exposing the existing features guided by our requirements engineering document, into a new modern web user interface accessible from desktops, tablets and smart phones. While the process of developing software is tedious, we know that as we expose those features to the user, they will be robust, flexible and comprehensive.

Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) A good start for a monitoring and evaluation component is also introduced directly within this EMIS project. An annual census was developed to collect a comprehensive set of data including data necessary for the calculation of education key indicators (e.g. enrollments, repeaters, transfers disaggregated by gender, age, class level and region), infrastructure data (e.g. water supply, toilets, dormitories) and school resources (e.g. communications equipment, electronic equipment, power supply equipment and library resources). This annual census eSurvey has an accompanying tool to bulk load the data into the EMIS for further processing and analysis and can also be submitted directly online through the EMIS UI for schools with reliable Internet access.

Lay Foundation for Future Work We now know exactly what next steps to take, what next features to expose and how to go about doing it building on all the work established in this project.

Project Activities Summary

During the first mission to RMI a number of important foundation activities were undertaken. The methodology was introduced to the Executing Agency (EA), a technical skills evaluation of local staff was conducted to better design training and other activities, local staff participated to daily training on general ICT systems and security subjects followed by modern database management and using a Student Information System called SchoolTool. A thorough analysis of existing documents and processes was done and from this a data model for the Public School System (PSS) was produced. The data model is a preliminary technical diagram illustrating the data needs of the PSS. Building on previous work accomplished so far a rough prototype of the RMI Education Management Information System (MIEMIS) was developed. This rough prototype will be used in following activities to both train local staff on how such system can be built and also as starting point to adapt the SPC supported Pacific EMIS into RMI’s MIEMIS. In short, first mission was mostly planning and analysis activies which also included some foundation work such as re-developing their computing infrastructure into a mini private data center.

In the second mission to Majuro work continues from the planning and analysis phases. Important tasks related to the consolidation of the RMI system/software requirements with the SPC supported Pacific EMIS was conducted. Software implementation of missing features along with refinements of existing features took place. Finally, a first incomplete but usable version of the new MIEMIS (i.e. RMI adoption of the Pacific EMIS) has been deployed on a local server along with systems administration and user training. A number of other auxiliary work had to be done as well such as support to deploy a new centralized User Authentication and Authorization system called Active Directory.

In the third mission to Majuro we enter the design, implementation and maintenance/ support phases of the project. Final configuration to adapt the Pacific EMIS into the MIEMIS was done along with necessary updates to the production MIEMIS system. The PDF eSurvey technology was introduced and deployed along with staff training. This means the MIEMIS now has a means to collect the necessary data into PDF annual (and quarterly) surveys and automatically import this data into the MIEMIS database for further processing/analysis (i.e. calculation of education key indicators, charts, reports). A number of new missing features were added to the adapted Pacific EMIS and contributed back to the project benefiting other Pacific countries. Several MIEMIS related processes where strengthened through a workshop with principals and on-going training with local staff.

In the fourth mission to Majuro a number of mature features entered maintenance phase while new missing features were analyzed and implemented. Production servers were upgraded and some minor outstanding issues addressed. Mature features such as managing schools in MIEMIS, the existing quarterly report (aka. 9-week report), the new PDF eSurvey (aka. annual census) and the core education indicators in MIEMIS were further polished and pushed to production. New features added include managing teachers and textbooks in MIEMIS. While some polishing of these new features and some additional process training is still needed, a great deal was achieved including the extraction, processing and import of existing data from the HR Abila MIP system to MIEMIS, the teacher related data collection process was improved, and the foundation for future work was laid out and documented.