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 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 limited time, geography, and general resource constraints. In the past, school inspection has often been carried out as a rushed exercise with inspectors jotting observations down on paper, but with no or little time to discuss the situation at the school with head teachers. Ideally, a school inspection should result in feedback to the school head teacher before the inspector's departure and subsequent school inspections should be informed by previous observations and discussions on how to improve the situation. 

Case background

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.

Most school inspectors in Edutopia have access to desktop computers or tablets. while most head teachers have access to a tablet or a Smartphone. 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 and stores official data collected from schools. 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. In essence, the ministry wants to see more utilization of data, not just data collection. 

Until now, inspections have been conducted using printed paper forms or non-standardized Excel sheets. 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 with no systematic reference to the previous inspection.

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

The minimum standard for the seat-to-learner ratio is 1:1.

The minimum standard for the textbook-to-learner ratio across all levels and subjects is 1:1.

The minimum standard for learner-to-classroom ratio is <53:1.

The minimum standard for learner-to-teacher ratio across all levels is <45:1.

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 decide to develop analytics for the school inspector and head teacher to review. The fact that indicators have specified minimum standards does not mean that these standards are met in every school.

Current school inspection workflow

A recent internal 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 negatively impact school inspectors' understanding of the data collection tools and data quality issues. The internal assessment also documented the existing school inspection procedures and workflows. The most common workflow is as follows:

  1. School inspectors plan the school visits for the upcoming month, sometimes by looking at previous school inspection reports.
  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 improvised Excel spreadsheet. To some degree, school inspectors collect different data in different formats based on personal preferences and experiences. 
  5. School inspectors and head teachers agree on priority 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 oral feedback on school performance based on the school inspection report. Sometimes they receive a printed paper 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 implemented. However, due to limited time, high staff turnover, and poorly kept records, school inspections often do not build on previous inspections in a meaningful way. 

How will the inspection tool be used?

The tool should support 1) inspection planning, 2) carrying out an inspection, and 3) provide a basic inspection report for head teacher approval at the end of an inspection. Inspectors will use the tool as they conduct school inspections. The resulting school inspection report may be shared with head teachers to agree on priorities and monitor progress at the school.

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.

Infrastructural conditions

Historically, the flow of paper reports is often delayed due to transportation challenges on poor roads and a lack of funds for fuel. 

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 tablets are inconsistent network access and the very high cost of mobile data.

Dealing with resource limitations in schools

The schools in Edutopia receive essential resources such as desks, chairs, textbooks, and newly posted teachers once a year from a national resource distribution and teacher posting mechanism. 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. Some posted teachers do not show up for work, especially in unattractive and remote areas. 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 a few years ago. Hence, recent school census data might be missing for many schools. 

When schools suffer from commodity shortages, 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 schools based on local agreements, but no official national resource redistribution scheme has been institutionalized. As explained 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". 

School inspectors should take an active role in facilitating resource distribution between schools, so that proper records are kept and resources accounted for. The school inspectors are in a better position to assess that resources are fairly distributed between the schools they are responsible for. 

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, a cadre of newly recruited school inspectors was recruited immediately after completing college. These school inspectors do not have significant experience as teaching staff. Their recruitment has been necessary due to the increasing data collection burden placed on school inspectors and schools. Essentially, 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 and are seen as 'errand boys' for the district education officers. School inspectors are mostly male. They often need to commute on motorbikes on muddy roads to reach schools effectively. 

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

App 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 terms and designs that are likely to be aligned with school inspectors' experiences, while leveraging the advantages of digital interfaces and workflows.

Your solution must address the following compulsory requirement:

  • Build a data collection interface for registering essential school inspection data associated with the DHIS2 school inspection event program. Data capture must 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 an app that supports school inspection. In addition to the compulsory requirement above, you must implement exactly 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 (pick two!)

Beyond the compulsory requirement, 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 functional extent 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. Don't reinvent the wheel! Make sure you make the most out of the DHIS2 platform resources.

1. School visit planner

The school visit planner feature should make it easy to identify which schools need 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 previous inspections). Working on this requires you to familiarize yourself with DHIS2 organization unit hierarchies ('orgunits') to list and compare the school inspection status of different schools.

Minimum requirements:

  • Show schools in the school inspectors' cluster based on time since last visits, critical need for follow-up due to performance issues, or other meaningful parameters (e.g., newly created school, school with new administration, or school with accessibility challenges during certain times of the year)

  • Visualize schools in the cluster either in a map or a landing page. It should be possible to select any school and show key data from the previous school inspection. This should help prepare the school inspector for the upcoming inspection.

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. You can assume that the education district officer will handle the formal process of registering the school in the national school registry.

Minimum requirements:

  • Develop a feature that allows a school inspector to record and store data about a new school 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 recording the number of books, chairs, desks, and teachers by subject. This information is tallied on paper and provided to the school inspector upon request during a 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 or previous resource counts.

Minimum requirements: 

  • Develop an interface for swift data capture from school resource recounts
  • The school inspector must be able to compare previously recorded data against the newly counted data
  • Significant changes in data should be highlighted either through percentages, rates, or ratios - not just in absolute numbers

4. Requests resources from nearby schools

When a school is low on non-human resources such as books or chairs, the school inspector should be able to initiate a transfer of resources from one or more nearby schools with surplus resources. Nearby schools are other schools within the same cluster or district (i.e., schools 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 initiate a resource transfer. You do not need to consider the further handling of the request by the recipient school. You can assume it will be possible for a school to accept or decline the request.

Minimum requirements: 

  • Provide 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. Offline features (this can be harder than you think!)

The school inspection application will be used in areas with intermittent or poor 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 at least the essential school inspection workflows described in the compulsory requirements.
  • Make sure data integrity is not compromised.

6. School inspection analytics

After a school inspection, the school inspector and the head teacher should take a moment to review the inspection results together. This could take the form of data visualizations on a school inspection Dashboard with graphs, tables, or charts. An analytical summary should be helpful for the school inspector and the head teacher in planning school improvements based on relevant indicators.

Minimum requirements: 

  • Develop a school inspection dashboard with representations of relevant indicators calculated from the school inspection. The dashboard could present performance indicators for the school over time, compare with other schools in the cluster, compare with the minimum standards, or all of these.
  • You should at least include the five Edutopia minimum standard indicators provided in the case background when making a school inspection Dashboard for school inspectors and head teachers. Feel free to explore other indicators and performance benchmarks. You can provide dummy data if the necessary data for these indicators are missing for your school.

Surprise us! (optional)

Picture of a parcel with gift wrapping

It is up to your group to decide if you want to implement one 'surprise us' requirement.

Implement one additional feature that you come up with yourself. This 'surprise us' feature is entirely up to you to define. However, you will have to justify the need for it in the context of the school inspection case. You should also be able to explain how it takes advantage of the DHIS2 platform resources. 

Do not prioritize this feature unless you are confident that you have fully covered the compulsory and two alternative requirements, and you are fully prepared to discuss and defend your group project from a development in platform ecosystems perspective!