Stakeholders in the nation’s education sector have advocated for more use of electronic student management system in the sector. According to them it is the panacea for poor student/ staff data management in education sector.
This was revealed recently at an event organized by Eko-konnect Research and Education initiative held in Lagos.
They also hailed Datasphir for debuting with Edu ERP, a student and staff administration software for educational institutions. The electronic student management software is a software that ease data management in the education sector expressing optimism about the enormous potentials of the software in changing the ugly trend of poor students/ staff data management in the nation’s institutions of learning.
The organizers of the workshop, Eko-konnect Research and Education initiative, said the three day workshop geared at facilitating the penetration of “Standards and trends in electronic student management and showcase how Edu ERP can facilitate the process”.
The organizers described the electronic student management software as ‘a robust and easy to use school management system for student administration, identity management, fee collection, examination processing and transcripts’ adding that the software was developed specifically for Nigerian education needs.
Mukom Tamon, a trainer at AFRINIC, an IT training institute who facilitated the first session titled: “Current situation with Student and Staff Management” gave a graphic description of needless stress an average student goes through while perfecting courses registration, fees payment and application for transcript because most institutions still use manual systems.
According to him, most drivers in the education sector especially key decision makers were dragging adopting the current trend of electronic student data management resulting in what he termed ‘Queues Symptoms” and its attendant consequences.
He noted that when queues are encouraged because institutions run manual data systems, there will be “inefficiency, greed, lack of skills and aparty to modernization”, Tamon says.
Omo Oaiya, a key facilitator at the event hinted on the efforts at getting regulatory agencies in education sector to set policy standards for student data management in nation’s tertiary institutions using EduERP as standard benchmark saying he is confident the efforts will yield tremendous results soon.
He however decried the aparty of top management executives in the sector to embracing automated data management, therefore urging the media to intensify sensitization and awareness of the new data management system.
Commenting on the importance of the workshop, Ibrahim Alio Sanda, Infrastructure Manager, Niger Research and Education Network, Niger Republic said he came to learn how to deploy the software in his institution that currently manages students’ data manually and by extension to other tertiary institutions in Niger Republic.
“What we are trying to do is to help our (Niger Republic) universities to avail themselves of the opportunities of Edu ERP. Because of the IT edge Nigeria has over our country we are rooting for a collaboration in advancing our own student information management system”, Sanda says.
He also noted that he had made a proposal which had been accepted by Datasphir for development of Edu ERP version that will be tailored to address his country education system which is a francophone country.
When asked about his assessment of the software, he observed that he had compared the product with other student information management software around saying the software ‘stands out’.
Victor Ayedun, a Don at Mass Communication department, University of Lagos, Akoka said though his institution has a robust student/staff data management but said it can be enhanced considering the enormous potentials and dynamic nature of EduERP.
Other participants include; Kehinde Olojede an ICT administrator, Federal College of Technology, Akoka who said he came to enrich his knowledge in modern student/staff data management and to get what he called a ‘practical knowledge’ of how EduERP functions.
Olamide Olalere, a data base administrator at National Open University of Nigeria, NOUN, was confident about what the workshop will deliver in terms of getting fresh perspectives in student data management and networking with experts in the sector.
Victor Ubah came from Benue State University to know more about the well cited software and see how he can deploy it in his institution.
Other institutions represented at the workshop include a foremost research institute in the country, Federal Institute of Industrial Research, Oshodi among others.
EDUERP, is a free open source software for education sector developed by Datasphir and launched November, 2012.
