By Peter OLUKA
The prestigious examination body in Africa, the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), is on the verge of an epoch-making event.
With over 40 million tested candidates in the last 71 years of its operations, WAEC in partnership with Sidmach Technologies, an ICT firm that develops and deploys software solutions at scale to solve high-impact business challenges, will this week launch a revolutionary education data platform codenamed EduStat.
Why EduStat?
As WAEC prepares to launch its revolutionary education statistics platform think about this scenario:
Olabisi Adebanjo (fictional name) is a final-year student at XYZ University. She plans to conduct a review of students’ Senior Secondary Certificate Examinations (SSCE) performances in the last 10 years.
Olabisi’s plan is to use Machine Learning to evaluate students’ performances in a particular school in Oyo State. From the results she can project how the school will perform in the next five SSCE sittings should things remain as they are, presently.
She also plans to make recommendations to students, parents, teachers, the school management, educational body (the government), and ultimately to commercialise her project building an EdTech startup upon passing out from her National Youth Service Corp.
Now, Olabisi is faced with one challenge – arranging the data set to achieve her goal. Where is the data?
This is where Edustat comes in. The platform offers educational analysis, using data visualization and data analysis tools as well as reliable educational assessment data to help users make informed decisions.
WAEC has been generating a lot of data over the years. Imagine 71 years of data backlogs in its vaults. And there are people who seek this data for academic purposes or government projects.
So, working with Sidmach, WAEC built the EduStat portal for the real-time generation of educational statistics over the years. And you should be excited because as a user you can filter the data down to specifics!
Who needs EduStat?
Researchers/academics (Ph.D. students, professorship, masters) – It is usually difficult to access accurate data that cover education statistics in gender, disabilities, regions, male/female and other indexes.
Researchers will have cause to smile because EduStat contains more than just statistical numbers; you are assured of infographics. The developers infused a summary of the statistics using Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools.
Therein are Graphs Optimization Guides (GOG) for people who have not used electronic graphs before. This guide tells them what each part of the graph represents; you can pan on the graphics too. You can query the graphics according to dates, or times.
Interestingly, the numbers can be converted in tabular formats – standard deviation of what statistics you are looking for. You can also save your report for personalized use – it can be downloaded as PDF and the graphs can be saved as images to be used in presentations.
The opportunities are numerous. Governments at all levels – Federal, State, LGA; MDAs, are welcome to use EduStat.
For instance, Kebbi State Government wants to assess the state’s performances in SSCE over the years. They can compare their State with other States for developmental planning, and interventions (in case the students are not doing well in certain subjects like English, Mathematics, etc).
A State Government that pays WAEC fees of its students would cherish having accurate data on their performances. This data is unique to WAEC! You can’t find it at the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). In fact, NBS relies on WAEC to provide them with certain data.
The usage is anonymous-based data. Unlike some institutions that share personal data; the WAEC EduStat is GDPR and NDPR-compliant.
Thus, Funding Agencies – The World Bank, UNESCO, DFID, etc., who are looking for reliable data for interventions for scholarships, and erecting classrooms/ this will help for informed decisions.
Schools are not left out. Schools would want to know how they perform in WAEC; maybe for the bragging rights of 9As or other achievements. This will help them compare with other schools. They can track how their female students are performing; how the students (generally) are doing per subject; juxtapose their performance to others.
So, with AI Predictive Modelling, schools shall be able to predict how students will perform in WAEC.
Parents who moved to new locations, but do not know which School to pick for their kids. Worry not; you can assess schools’ performance in WAEC through EduStat.
Private Corporate/Individuals – Any company that does anything on Education like uLessons, Edusko, – this will help them to build, and scale up their products, contents, or solutions around particular subjects. They can ascertain how candidates are performing, in each subject, in real-time.
You feel like signing up on EduStat, right? Great! WAEC will launch the product this week and you will get to know how to subscribe and even the Wallet system that follows.
