Open Admin to Promote Education Management Information System

in Secondary Education System of Tajikistan

2007 – 2008

Overview

The Public Fund Civil Initiative on Policy of Internet (CIPI) jointly with its NGO partners, supported by the Education Program and Information Program of OSI Tajikistan has piloted an open model of the education management information system (EMIS) on the basis of OpenAdmin in over 20 secondary schools and one university. The project was implemented in two phases:

Goal of the Project: To promote an open model of the education management information system  (EMIS) in the education system of the country as a standard through expansion of piloting a GNU GPL´ed application OpenAdmin in over 20 educational establishments across the country.

To achieve the goal of the Project the following objectives have to be completed:

•         Expansion of OpenAdmin piloting to the level of the most schools of one district;
•         Promoting OpenAdmin implementation in at least one university;
•         Further adapting of the OpenAdmin software application to meet new requirements of the national education system;
•         Conducting training on benefits of OpenAdmin as a free and open source software for local education system technological independence;
•         Continue OpenAdmin implementation in educational establishments of Khatlon;
•         Organize a roundtable discussion on benefits of open model of EMIS for qualified and transparent management of school, and running training process and students´ parents involvement in it;
•         Promote open model of EMIS as a standard one for education system;

•       Raising funds for expanding scope of OpenAdmin applications in rural schools.
  

Jointly with a local education-oriented NGO Centre for Education Reform Support Pulse, CIPI localized into both Tajik and Russian languages a FOSS application OpenAdmin. The application was modified to meet the national education system requirements so that it can be used to produce various reports, which schools are required to submit regularly to education regulator. To demonstrate the application capacity in both management and education, partners piloted it in 4 secondary schools. The result was demonstrated to the Ministry of education representatives, other interested in ICT for education development parties and local and international experts, during the joint roundtable discussion organized on April 3, 2007. Representatives of the Ministry of Education and ADB Aid Coordination Unit studying the local education market to develop EMIS conception and an action plan to deploy it, found OpenAdmin an effective tool to promote technological part of EMIS. The Ministry of Education of RT issued a letter of support of this joint initiative, which is attached to this document

CIPI experts had an opportunity to introduce the result of OpenAdmin adaptation and piloting in the International Conference on Information Technologies in Education in the 21-st Century, held on May 21-23, 2007 in Yerevan. The Conference participants accepted the achievement of Tajikistani delegation with a high interest.

To provide more effective expansion of piloting through sharing advantages of EMIS with the administration of secondary schools, CIPI arranged 4-day-training for directors of 10 secondary schools within its Summer School 2007 initiative. It allowed initiating OpenAdmin piloting for 6 secondary schools of Khatlon located in key cities – Qurghonteppa and Kulob. Those schools that have been connected through ICB project have gained basic capacity and a necessary infrastructure, consisting of server and local area network with connection to Internet allowing to run OpenAdmin for their activities. Two seminars explaining the benefits of OpenAdmin were conducted in both cities for teachers, schools administrations and education departments. Thus, a good platform to achieve the goal of current project in Khatlon has already been established.

The success of this initiative had been mostly provided by partnerships of two NGOs – implementers as well as partnerships of two OSI Tajikistan Programs – Education and Information. Considering the achieved outcome and gained experience of its team during the OpenAdmin piloting, CIPI believes in strengthening FOSS applications position in the education system management by widening the piloting scope into more schools and a university across the country. The most significant expected long-term outcome of this project could be sustainability of the technological independence of the country education system.

Problem Description

Tajikistan understands the importance of the information and communication technologies (ICT) as enabler of its socio-economical development. This understanding is justified by identifying the state political will with the e-strategyas its core. This document considers ICT as a tool of development of all sectors of economy to achieve its goal – creating an information society in the country as part of the global information society. A vital role in this process is allocated to education system that has to implement ICT in all level of education process as well as facilitate ICT penetration in other sectors of economy through contribution in human resource and content development.

Nevertheless, those ICT-oriented projects that have been implemented in the education system are mainly focused on hardware infrastructure development with less attention to its technological and legal components. As a result most of the technologies (software applications, operating systems) implemented in the education system are proprietary ones. CIPI is not against proprietary technologies, but the way it is distributed and used is questionable. Many educational establishments either receive pre-installed computer equipment with these technological solutions with not legal right to use them or install unauthorized copies of those technologies themselves. Thus contributing in growth of illegal usage of creative products in the academic community, the biggest one in the country. They are mostly not aware of this legal issue, but as the Constitution of RT states ¨Ignorance of the law is not excuse¨.

The above described situation mainly exists within the education process of the educational establishments and fortunately has not yet influenced the education management system. There are attempts of the international finance institutions to implement EMIS in the education system of the country in order to raise its efficiency and effectiveness, which is definitely just-in-time and a very good initiative. But the threat exists that the choice will be given to the proprietary solutions when the time for EMIS technological component implementation comes, mostly because decision-makers as well as schools (administration and teachers) are get used to these technologies. There is no doubt that international institutions supporting EMIS are capable to afford authorized copies of proprietary technologies for piloting period. The issue is a legal sustainability of this initiative upon this period, when EMIS is officially run in the national education system.

CIPI Approach to Address the Challenge

CIPI has been dealing with the intellectual property rights (IPR) issues of the technologies since the beginning of its activity. Two principles that CIPI thinks are vital to achieve sustainability of the information and communications for development (ICD) projects are respect the rules of law that target group is capable to afford upon the project implementation and opportunity to adapt technologies for meeting the target group needs, but not vice versa. That is why CIPI always chooses the free and open technological solutions, i.e. free and open source software (FOSS) applications to implement ICT-oriented projects either by itself or jointly with partners. As it is indicated in the CIPI Projects list (see Table 1 in Annex A) it also constantly contributes in and support other organizations initiatives on localization of the FOSS applications. Just two examples justifying above statements:

•         the biggest project – ICB (see Table 1 in Annex A) is fully based on the FOSS applications implementation in all target group institutions including all components such as networking infrastructure development (servers), human capacity building (trainings), and content development (content management system). In order to be eligible to run project based on FOSS, CIPI initiated and found support of the Ministry of Education to modify the IT curriculum into a platform independent (operating system neutral) one;
•         as a platform for EMIS (Education Management Information System) implementation in the national education system, CIPI suggested a GNU GPL´ed application – OpenAdmin that was localized, adapted to local needs and piloted in 4 partner-schools of ICB project.

It has to be also mentioned that the main document identifying ICT State policy - the e-strategy also considers utilization of FOSS as a tool to narrow the existing digital divide in the country.

Expanding OpenAdmin Piloting

Within the framework of the Internet Capacity Building Project (ICB), CIPI has been working for initial piloting of OpenAdmin with 4 secondary schools of Dushanbe. These partner-schools are:

1. Secondary school #93 of Sino District, http://school93.maktab.tj/
2. Secondary school #50 of Sino District, http://school50.maktab.tj/
3. Gymnasium #74 of Firdawsi District, http://school74.maktab.tj/
4. Gymnasium #53 of Somoni District, http://school53.maktab.tj/
   

Indicating the websites of these schools is important part of the piloting project, since all interested parties can access the public reports that OpenAdmin allows to produce are available on them. Also the users of this application, and it allows to have 3 categories of users, can access the working interface of it via the school website. The categories varies from administrator and/or director of school, teacher, and student and parents of student. As it was mentioned above, the OpenAdmin is already adapted to meet the national education system requirements. And the availability of its source code allows CIPI to make any changes that educators might need during the project run.

All the tools that OpenAdmin requires to run it are free and open source, including MySQL database system, webserver – Apache, browser – Firefox, web development tool – Joomla. The complex part of it, configuration and support of the servers and database system will be done by CIPI qualified team. The partners – schools will work on entering the school data and development of their websites.

One of the significant component in running OpenAdmin is availability of an experienced team to create and manage the database. CIPI plans to organize training courses for those teachers and active students that will be involved in the implementation process. Through ICB project and the first phase of OpenAdmin piloting, CIPI created a team of trainers that already passed similar training course and are experienced in filling in the OpenAdmin database. This team has also web designing skills to help new pilot school teachers for website development. CIPI plans to develop administrator and user manuals too.

Since two schools participated in the previous phase of the piloting are from Sino district, which is the largest in the sense of having secondary schools in Dushanbe, CIPI plans to run the project in this district. Considering a networking platform established for running OpenAdmin and human capacity developed to manage it in two key cities of Khatlon, CIPI suggests to expand piloting process in those cities. The Education Board of Dushanbe city and Education departments of Qurghonteppa and Kulob cities have been supportive during the first phase of the project and considers CIPI as its partner in deploying ICT for education. Thus the proposed project will have administrative and policy support of the educators and decision making bodies (see Annex B).

A university for piloting OpenAdmin will be selected among 17 universities-target group of ICB project located in Dushanbe and Khatlon.

To achieve the active involvement of the schools and a university administrations it is planned to arrange regular meeting and a seminar for the target schools directors and leaderships of the district education department and university. The outcome of the first OpenAdmin piloting will be demonstrated to them. The benefits of EMIS will be delivered to participants too.

Expected Outcomes

Assuming that the Project objectives are achieved the following outcomes are expected:

•       The GNU GPL´ed OpenAdmin application is piloted successfully in over 20 educational establishments across the country. It is expected OpenAdmin be considered as a standard to run EMIS for school administration;
•         Running OpenAdmin in one of the universities;
•         Development of the schools website under the maktab.tj portal;
•         Development and distribution of OpenAdmin user manual in the state language;
•         Development of the school management database that is a significant contribution towards implementation of ICT in education management as well;
•         Funds raised to implement OpenAdmin as a standard model of EMIS technological component.
•         Contribution in strengthening the technological independence of the education system of the country as well as development of culture of respects to intellectual property rights.

Briefly about OpenAdmin

To facilitate implementation of ICT in management of education system, which is a significant component of education management information system (EMIS), CIPI jointly with Pulse initiated localization and adaptation one a GNU GPL´ed software application Open Administration for Schools – Open Admin (http://richtech.ca/openadmin/index.html).

OpenAdmin is a School Administration Program. It is a free and open source software that allows addressing needs of schools for data management (storage, usage, production, access, etc). The program is entirely web based application built on open tools, such as MySQL, PHP. Located centrally in any webserver can be accessed by school administration, teachers, students and their parents online through their own accounts. Some of features that OpenAdmin offers for these three category of users are:

for administration:

•       school data accessibility for making management decision;
•         management of data of personnel, students, parents;
•         development of various types of reports;
•         communication environement with parents;
•         management of school´s property;
•         data exchange with other institutions;

for parents and students:

•         availability of online gradebook, which automatically reflects the marks and assessments that teachers enter;
•         access to the training timetable;
•         list of subjects and teachers;
•         personal data of student;
•       facility to send/receive emails to/from teachers and school administration

for teachers:

•        online management of groups daybook, access to reports;
•         facility to send/receive emails to/from parents and school administration;
•         access to the list of textbooks and training plans;

Annex A. Public Fund CIPI Background

URL: http://www.cipi.tj/

CIPI Mission: Promoting the information and communication technologies as enabler of socio-economical development of society.

CIPI Vision: Equal opportunities to access and contribute in development of the global economical benefits independent of location.

CIPI Brief Introduction: The Public Fund Civil Initiative on Policy of Internet (CIPI) is a civil society and a non for profit Tajikistani organization. CIPI objective is to enable the growth of an uncensored, decentralized, user-controlled and affordable Internet, adapting of ICTs to meet local needs through harmonization of legal and regulatory frameworks and development of an effective ICT policy.

CIPI was established as a separate legal entity in February 2003. But its activity in Tajikistan started earlier as the Global Internet Policy Initiative (http://www.internetpolicy.net/) a joint project of Internews Network and the Center for Democracy and Technology in October 2001. The experience of the project demonstrated the efficiency of developing it into an independent civil society organization.

The ICT-oriented projects that CIPI has been implementing since the beginning of 2005 are briefly described in Table 1. To increase effectiveness and sustainability of projects, CIPI widely make use of the free and open source software (FOSS).

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