Educational management information systems: An example for developing countries

In developing countries, mobile, nomadic and handheld technologies have the capacity to gather, store, deliver and enhance information in ways that are completely different from countries where mains electricity, computer hardware and internet connectivity are stable, reliable, cheap and abundant. They also have the capacity to subvert the received wisdom on IS development. This paper describes work currently under way in Kenya to support education nationally with a project specifically developed to meet the infrastructural and organisational requirements of an environment dramatically different that of most IS projects. The work discussed in this paper is part of a project called SEMA! that was originally designed to support national in-service training. The University of Wolverhampton developed SMS messaging alongside audio and video cassettes developed with BBC support and print material developed with CEL support. The University of Wolverhampton has been working to bring together Kenya policy-makers, technologists and educationalists to develop a messaging targeted bulk SMS system for the 200,000 in-service teacher participants. This SMS system will help structure the study programme, address the isolation of distance learners and deliver learning simply, sustainably and cost-effectively. The technologies chosen are the most robust, appropriate and socially inclusive and the development process has been designed to promote dialogue and capacity across the various local communities of practice and expertise. The project has revealed the sophistication and agility of the mobile phone networks in Kenya and of the developers of their 'value-added' services, and subsequent work, described in this paper, has been exploring the possibility of running much of the country's schools' statistical returns off SMS. Currently it seems that schools provide regular statistical returns to District and Provincial education offices and that these returns place a vital role in national planning and in the allocation of resources to individual schools. These returns are currently transmitted by letter-post, courier or by phone conversation. These are potentially slow, expensive and error-prone. Many or most of them are however never used, only stored. Further research has been undertaken to document the exact nature of the returns, the use to which they are put and the various ways in which they are submitted. The notion of using SMS as the main input medium and also the medium for exception-reporting is still very novel but a trial system has been specified, developed and trialled. Trials are now underway to explore both aspects of large-scale SMS use. The project is supported by DfID, because of its relevance to models of appropriate mobile learning for the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, and is intended to explore regionally relevant solutions. More importantly, the project is intended to help build capacity locally and challenge models of ICT and IS rooted in Europe, the Far East and America. This account looks at developing IS capacity and is based on ongoing research and consultancy taking place in the UK and Kenya starting in 2004.