Evolution of EMIS
The revolution in the information and communication technologies (ICTs) has greatly influenced the life style of whole world. ICTs has a proven role in the field of medical, business, industry, entertainment, communications but now these technologies has emerging efficient role in education field. In developing countries, education sector is one of the core areas that require more attention for the country’s rapid development. The goal of every educational institution is to provide the quality education to all of its students. In these institutes management at all level continuous strives to achieve this aimed goal. Universities are hiring highly qualified professors and equipping their scientific laboratories with latest equipment’s, adding new technologies and books to their libraries. In these educational institutions the concept of digital libraries is also introduced, in classrooms multimedia projects are installed. The concept of distant learning, different tutorials like web and disk based as well as the concept of audio and visual data to aid lectures is introduced in these institutions. In short, ICTs have played a major significant role for knowledge dissemination among various groups in these educational institutions.
In order to get the maximum benefits of the available facilities of hardware and software, it is not enough to just connecting the laboratories with the internet facility but there is lot more in to this. This type of human attitude towards the computer resources propose that there is always a need for some educational intervention to get the possible benefits. The better usage of information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be attained by pedagogic intercessions. As the issues raises, it starts creating interesting opportunities for the individuals and organizations for improving the individuals’ understandability and skills. From the educational point of view, it is believed that when the individuals’ discernment is challenged and they receive any sort of intellectual or practical support then their productive and creative talents are used which can also be enhanced.
In all this competitive ICTs equipped educational institutions there is much more than the quality education that is expected by the students. Students need quality service in all of the required information that is required by them. In order to present their day to day problems, students needs environment that can facilitate them in every way. Different higher educational institutions are continuously striving to achieve this target. For example when a student require his transcripts after courses finalization then it can take more than a month time when there is conventional system installed in educational institutions. It can take more time because of the limited number of acting staff members that are dealing with the results and transcripts issuing process. There are many other daily issues that can arise every day and this limited number of staff will not be able to prompt instantaneously to all of the students. In order to handle such hectic routine universities used to employee more employees but as its known that increasing manpower can never solve the problem so another solution is required that can cope up with all such issues. There are many activities that can not be handled with simple processing applications and they are also much time consuming but these are simple processes like admission, registration, conduction of examination, keeping track of the employees and students and managing both employees and students accounts. In order to manage thousands of its students and employees the best effective way is to use the information and communication technologies in more efficient way.
Educational management information system (EMIS) is an example of such an information system that has been developed over past several years to get the maximum benefits from the human and machine interaction to generate the appropriate information. This concept of EMIS has been imported from the business world which represents a system for information processing for educational management. This system is not developed to replace the statistics based system and this system itself is not a statistical system. This system has been developed to handle all data types which may be statistical in nature. An authoritative professional is required to train this data as reliable, verified, authoritative and professionally trained. This authority must be professional and independent entity that must be acceptable by all of the other users in an organization. When an information system is being developed then it is very much necessary to get the exact and reliable statistics before this system get applied to any sort of management. Information systems are always designed to process valid data into information not the garbage data. In educational management information systems, these information systems should address both of the management and statistics in more efficient way and should produce information in an effective format.
Concept and Definition of EMIS
There are many definitions and descriptions about the EMIS systems as its being developed over the past several years. Educational management information system (EMIS) is a formalized collection of the operational procedures, processes and mutual agreement that are integrated in such a way that it can produce useful information and data for the educational institutions and all of related entities like teachers, students and other management at all levels. All of the data relevant to the concerned entities is aggregated, collected and organized, managed and processed which is then disseminated across the organization and is used by the concerned authorities and management at all levels to take the beneficial decisions for the educational institutions. EMIS contains all of the relevant information that is required by the educational managers at all levels to support all of their activities.
Educational management information system (EMIS) always responds to the consumers for the effective information and serves the needs of end users, therefore it can be said that these information systems are serving on the basis of demand response methodology. In order to get the maximum benefits out of this information system it is very much necessary that the process chain of information management and in the transaction between the end users’ demand of information and the system response of information delivery, all of the statistics must be updated and reviewed properly. If this whole chain of information management is not properly maintained then there will be no meaningful information from the data aggregation and processing. The system integration is also much important in EMIS to get the best possible outcome from the system because if there will be any problem with the system integration it will results in irrelevant information delivery that will make whole EMIS as an irrelevant system.
In order to work these EMIS systems up to dated, it is necessary to conduct clients’ surveys. These surveys will help the educational institutes to cope up with all of the newly raised requirements and then it will give up dated response to its consumers. These surveys will also help to figure out the needs of producers and will generate a user friendly and interpretable services and products accordingly. Educational institutes should also create general awareness among the users about the advantages of these EMIS systems that can provide information for decision making.
In order to avoid a total system loss, it is very much important that these EMIS systems should be self sustainable and they must have a back up even if master system will fail to fulfill the requirements of all of its end users. At the very earlier stage of system development it is important to train the individual entities but at the later stage of capacity building this training is not of much importance.
Educational management information system (EMIS) systems have been employed in many different countries as a big success and there these systems have provided support services and capacity building to the distributed as well as the decentralized statistical functions. There are many specialized functions needed for the EMIS development such as setting the standards, development of application software, quality control, providing technical assistance and training services as well as coordinating annual statistics production. System integration is an important step in EMIS development because all of the loose parts will be combined efficiently can develop an effective system output. Quality control is also of much significance because it can assure quality checks at all levels.
In educational institutions, an effective and efficient information management system that should help management at all level for planning, policy making, and management can be developed by adopting common data collection instruments, by developing data processing software and by adopting all of the procedures for quality control and assurance. Such a developed system can assure the effective performance of all of the statistical functions in the institutes. The processes of data collections its entry and verification are all very close to the source. This data is then transmitted as an electronic copy all around the institute. At every level of management, this data is analyzed on the basis of the users’ requirements which ensure the minimization of inconsistency and task duplication’s. Such a system also ensures the quality, reliability, data validity and effectiveness as well as the end users’ satisfaction at all levels.