IN5320 - Development in platform ecosystems

School inspection in Eduotopia

Insufficient education services prevent children in Edutopia from acquiring basic numeracy and literacy skills. A large portion of schools in Edutopia are short on qualified teachers and essential resources such as classrooms, desks, seats, toilets, and textbooks. Some schools have sufficient or even a surplus of resources, while others struggle to retain qualified teachers, obtain necessary resources, and deliver quality education. School inspection is one means to ensure fair distribution of limited resources, support school administration and management, and identify needs for pedagogical training among active teaching staff. School inspection should take place monthly at each school, but this is not always realistic due to time and resource constraints. A school inspection should result in feedback to the school head teacher before the inspector's departure. 

Case description

Edutopia has implemented the DHIS2 platform to support education sector management. You can get more information about how different countries use DHIS2 in the education sector here.

As most school inspectors and head teachers in Edutopia have access to desktop computers or tablets, the Ministry of Education in Edutopia wants a digital tool that can be used by school inspectors during school visits. The application needs to be built on top of DHIS2, which serves as the national Education Management Information System in Edutopia. A key intention is to enable better data sharing and coordination between district education officers (the managers of the school inspectors), school inspectors, and school head teachers to improve school management. 

Until now, inspections have been conducted using printed paper forms or non-standardized Excel formats. It usually takes a long time (often up to three months) to generate informative reports. At the school level, the inspector’s involvement typically ends on the day of the inspection, and the next visit would be another round of inspection.

Some relevant indicators and minimum standards that might be useful to be aware of when making a tool for school inspectors and head teachers includes the following:  

In Edutopia the minimum standard for the seat to student / learner ratio is1:1.

In Edutopia the minimum standard for the textbook to student / learner ratio across all levels and subjects is1:1.

In Edutopia the minimum standard for learner to classroom ratio is <53:1.

In Edutopia the minimum standard for learner to teacher ratio across al levels is <45:1.

In Edutopia the minimum standard for learner to toilet ratio is <25:1.

With a focus on gender equality, the education system also monitors the Gender Parity Index (GPI): the number of female learners divided by males and the number of female teachers divided by males.

The indicators above might serve as inspiration if you want to develop analytics for the school inspector or head teacher to review. The fact that indicators have minimum standards defined does not mean that these standards are always met.

How will the tool be used?

The tool should provide easy access to relevant school data. The application should record and store school visit data. The tool should assist school inspection by supporting inspection planning, the conduct of an inspection, and the generation and sharing of inspection reports with head teachers at the end of an inspection. Historically, the flow of paper reports is often delayed due to transportation challenges, poor roads, lack of funds, etc.

The application should be user-friendly. Ideally, it should handle offline situations (such as viewing previous reports or temporarily storing newly collected data) to support school inspection in environments challenged with intermittent Internet connectivity.

The school inspection application is envisioned to be used primarily by school inspectors, and secondarily by head teachers. Inspectors will use the tool as they conduct school inspections. The resulting report may be used by head teachers to set priorities and track progress at the school level. In terms of oversight, managers at the regional and national levels might also want to be able to track the level of progress of the schools.

Current school inspection workflow

Edutopia Ministry of Education staff conducted an assessment to document existing school inspection procedures and workflows. The most common workflow is as follows:

  1. School inspectors plan the school visits for the upcoming month.
  2. School inspectors travel to each school to meet with the head teacher and teaching staff. 
  3. School inspectors cover the inspection themes for a particular visit through observation and interviews at the school.
  4. The school inspector records data on paper-based forms, or sometimes in an Excel spreadsheet. The format for Excel spreadsheets has not been standardized. Hence, different school inspectors collect different data in different formats based on personal preferences and experiences. 
  5. School inspectors and head teachers come up with key areas for improvement and an action plan for school improvement
  6. School inspectors produce reports that are sent to the district education officer for approval
  7. The head teacher receives feedback on school performance based on the school inspection report 
  8. The cycle starts again with a new round of school inspections. Ideally, school visits build on previous visits to ensure that action points have been followed up by the school. However, due to limited time and sometimes poorly kept records, school inspections often do not build on previous visits in a meaningful way. 

Dealing with resource limitations
The schools in Edutopia receive essential resources such as desks, seats, textbooks, and newly posted teachers once a year from a national distribution and posting mechanism organized centrally by the Ministry of Education. A few weeks into the academic year, there is a national survey that captures data about learner enrollment and actual teaching capacity and resources available at the school. The data from the school census is digitized and stored on the national DHIS2 platform. Unfortunately, due to resource constraints, a full national survey was last conducted in 2020. Hence, more recent data might be missing. 

When schools suffer from resource shortages during the year, the central level has limited resources on hand and might not be in a position to alleviate the situation. Some head teachers arrange ad-hoc transfer of resources between their schools based on local agreements, but no official national resource redistribution scheme has been institutionalized. As articulated by one head teacher: 

“A head teacher may call from a nearby school if they experience a resource shortage. Then, I check if we have more resources than we need. If that is the case, I arrange for the transfer of what we can spare". 
 

Infrastructural conditions

All school inspectors and head teachers who will use the school inspection application have access to desktop computers or tablets. Stable electricity is accessible through the power grid or from generators. However, internet connectivity in Edutopia varies throughout the day. In some areas, connectivity is lost for several hours. The most frequently mentioned challenges to using computers and tables are inconsistent network access and the high cost of mobile data.

School inspector profile

The primary end-user for your application is the school inspector. School inspectors have traditionally been trained as teachers and have worked in the education sector as either teachers or head teachers before becoming school inspectors. However, recently a cadre of newly recruited school inspectors have been recruited straight after completing their degree and do not have any experience as teaching staff. Their recruitment has been necessary due to the increasing data collection burden placed on school inspectors and schools. Essentially, today school inspectors spend more time filling out paper forms than they do providing pedagogical guidance. Due to their lack of seniority and experience, some of the newly recruited school inspectors struggle to be taken seriously by experienced head teachers and teaching staff at the schools and are seen as "errand boys" for the district education officers. School inspectors are mostly male and they often need to commute on bicycles and motorbikes on muddy and dusty roads to reach schools effectively. 

A recent assessment carried out by the Ministry of Education found problems in terms of missing data, incorrect data, and duplicate data. The general lack of on-the-job training and lack of intuitive and standardized data collection tools appears to negatively impact school inspectors' understanding of the data collection tools and data quality issues. 

There are significant differences in the digital literacy levels of the school inspectors. Some use tablets and smartphones in their daily lives and have extensive experience with the use of Excel and mobile web services such as Facebook and WhatsApp. Others have limited experience with the use of digital technologies and are more accustomed to paper-based tools and information flows, while they might occasionally access the Internet to check football results or the news. 

 “What is important for me is that I can provide actual guidance to head teachers and teaching staff at the schools. I need to be able to follow up on school progress over time, rather than just collect data. This means that I need to keep a good and systematic overview of the schools' resources and performance. Sometimes, our reports are subject to a review from the Ministry of Education central office, which means that I must be able to quickly provide an overview of all my schools and the main challenges they are faced with” - Experienced school inspector in Edutopia

Compulsory requirements

Your group is requested to design and develop a web-based DHIS2 app that supports the work of school inspectors. You should use the provided information about the context, existing paper based workflows, and the end-user as a basis for how you design your solution. Hence, you should think carefully about the design of a digital workflow that facilitates a smooth transition from existing workflows. Consider adopting terminologies and designs that are consistent with school inspectors' mental models and experiences, while leveraging the advantages of a digital interface and workflow.

As a bare minimum, your solution must address the following two essential requirements:

  • Build a data collection interface for registering essential school inspection data associated with the DHIS2 school inspection event program. 

  • Data capture should have basic validation and feedback in case of wrong or unexpected inputs. 

It is up to your group to ideate, prototype, and decide how you will design and develop a solution that can support school inspection. However, in addition to the compulsory requirements above, you must implement two of the requirements described in the next section, called “additional requirements”. It is advisable to start with a minimum viable product based on the compulsory requirements as soon as possible.

Additional requirements

Beyond the compulsory requirements, you must choose and implement two of the additional requirements described below. Implementation of more than two additional requirements will not have a positive impact on the evaluation of your project. The minimum requirements described for each additional requirement is what you must cover for the requirement to be considered implemented. Think carefully about which requirements go well together and comprise a useful and coherent application in the Edutopia school inspection case. When in doubt about the use context of the application, please document the assumptions you make to arrive at workflow, application design, and development decisions. This will be helpful when you justify and explain your choices in the final group presentation. Also, make sure you reflect on the division of work, logic, data handling, and design between your application and the DHIS2 platform. 

1. School visit planner

The school visit planner feature should make it easy to identify which schools are in need of school inspection either because they have not been visited in a long time or the school is in critical need of follow-up (poor results on last inspection). Working on this requirements requires you to familiarize yourself with DHIS2 organization unit hierarchies (orgunits).

Minimum requirements:

  • show schools in the school inspectors' cluster based on time since last visits, critical need for follow up, or other meaningful parameters

  • visualize the schools in the cluster either in a map or a landing page so that any school can be selected and key data from last school visit can be shown to prepare the school inspector for the upcoming inspection. This could for example include a picture of the school, if one has been uploaded to the database

2. Record a new school

Sometimes, in Edutopia, a new school is established by community members in an ad hoc manner. It could be an outdoor school under a large tree or it could be a new structure put in place by community volunteers. A school inspector who identifies a new school structure where teaching is taking place should report on the activities, location, and current name of the new school. This should generate a message to the education district officer who will handle the further process of qualifying the school in the national school registry.

Minimum requirements:

  • develop a solution that allows a school inspector to record and store data about a new school identified in their cluster, including real-time capture of geo-coordinates and a picture of the school structure

3. School resource count

Every year, the school needs to count the actual resources at hand and update the resources recorded in DHIS2. This exercise involves the school teachers and other staff physically counting the number of books, chairs, and teachers by subject, one by one. This information is tallied on paper and provided to the school inspector upon request during school inspection. The resource recount feature should make it easy to identify significant drops or increases in resources available at the school by comparing recount figures with the last official school census data.

Minimum requirements: 

  • develop an interface for the swift capture of school resource recounts
  • the school inspector must be able to compare previously recorded census data against the new counts data
  • significant discrepancies should be highlighted either based on significant changes to rates, ratios, or in absolute numbers

4. Requests resources from nearby schools

When a school is critically low on non-human resources such as books or seats, the school inspector might initiate a transfer of resources from a nearby school. Nearby schools are other schools within the same cluster or district (in DHIS2 this means other orgunits with the same parent orgunit). Since the resources of all schools are captured in the same database, it is possible to assess the current resource ratios and absolute numbers of surplus resources at nearby schools. With this information, the school inspector can request a transfer. You do not need to consider the further handling of the request by the recipient school, but you can assume it will be possible for the other school to accept or decline the request.

Minimum requirements: 

  • provide school managers with an overview of up-to-date ratios (e.g., books or chairs per learner) at nearby schools and absolute numbers of "surplus" resources to help identify where there is potential for a transfer

5. Training mode

As the school inspector profiles vary in terms of prior work experience and digital literacy, the Ministry of Education would like the application to have a training mode where the end user can test the flow of the application and get additional guidance on how the application works and how to use it. Any changes in terms of data storage etc. made in the sandbox mode should not be stored permanently in the database. The training mode has to involve more than simply turning off data storage and providing static text/commentaries on the different interfaces/pages of the application.

Minimum requirements: 

  • develop a sandbox mode of the application that allows the user to test and experience the main workflows of the application and receive additional guidance
  • include user feedback that is beneficial for novice users but not necessary for the day-to-day use of the application by experienced users

6. Offline features

The school inspection application will be used in areas with intermittent internet connectivity. The Ministry of Education wants the application to support offline workflows when internet connectivity is lost so that school inspections can be carried out and data can be synchronized when internet connectivity is restored.

Minimum requirements: 

  • develop offline support for the essential school inspection workflows in the fundamental requirements
  • make sure data integrity is not compromised.

7. School management report

After a school inspection, the head teacher should receive a report. This could take the form of data visualizations on a Dashboard with graphs, tables, or charts. An analytical summary should be helpful for head teachers in preparing school improvements in critical areas based on relevant indicators.

Minimum requirements: 

  • develop a school inspection report / dashboard with visualization of relevant indicators calculated from the school inspection. The report / dashboard could present performance indicators for the school in question over time, compare with other schools in the cluster, or both.
  • You should at least include indicators on learner to textbook, desk, chair, toilets, and teacher. Feel free to explore other indicators and performance benchmarks. You can provide dummy data if any required data for these indicators is missing for your school.