OpenEMIS Jordan: Building a resilient Education Management Information System (EMIS) addressing the needs of national and refugee communities

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Teacher agency, internationalization, and higher education

Proposal

In response to violence and destruction in Syria, since 2011, over 5.6 million people have fled to Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and many other countries worldwide, according to UNHCR. To help refugees in Jordan, Community Systems Foundation (CSF) and UNESCO Jordan supported the Jordanian Ministry of Education (MoE) by tracking educational data of refugee children in camps, notably in the Za’atari refugee camp. This was done through the customization of OpenEMIS, an open-source Education Management Information System (EMIS) developed and maintained by CSF and supported by UNESCO.

Through formal evaluation of the project, valuable lessons can be drawn to understand the challenges and successes of EMIS implementation, the importance of customizable and autonomous systems and how EMIS data drives evidence-based national policy.

Initially, the MoE underwent constant shifts in leadership. With four Ministerial appointments in the first stage implementation, the vision of and support for OpenEMIS consistently changed. As a result, a disconnect was noted between policy-makers and planners and the data derived from the system.

At the local level, school principals faced challenges in registering students in a rational way. While Jordanian children are easily tracked using their national IDs, in many cases, tracking refugee children was difficult because some students had never been assigned an identification number, while others had accumulated up to three. This created difficulties in knowing which students were registered and which were associated with several numbers.

While the former EMIS housed hundreds of thousands of data points on education in Jordan, the Ministry did not own the data. When data was needed, the Ministry had to request access to specific datasets, corresponding analyses, and reports. The introduction of OpenEMIS gave the MoE autonomy to own, access and use education data for the first time.

With this autonomy, the Ministry has customized their platform to assist in effective management, both at the school- and ministry-levels. Through OpenEMIS Core, Ministry staff are now able to track individual student, staff and institution level data enabling the Ministry to track participation, inclusivity, infrastructure, resources and learning results. With tools to build and maintain data dashboards, the Ministry is also able to design meaningful tools to communicate key results of the sector. This enables policy-makers and planners to use the data and visualizations to create legislation and plans that responds to national priorities.

Despite these challenges, implementing OpenEMIS has allowed the MoE to strengthen institutional systems and leverage data to inform and monitor national priorities, including aiding Syrian refugee learners.

A tangible results includes the introduction of 198 double shifted schools and nearly 6,000 additional teachers to ensure refugee children were receiving a quality education.

Author

• Jon Frederic Kapp, Community Systems Foundation