MERN Stack Web-Based Education Management Information Systems for Pacific Island Countries

Abstract

Generation of quality data to aid planning, assessing the education performance, monitoring programs implementation and learning outcomes are the basic functions of the Education Management Information System (EMIS). This study examines the existing EMIS in the Pacific Island Countries PICs and proffers solution. A SWOT analysis on the selected PICs EMIS through the published technical reports and policy documents from government and donors’ between years 2000 and 2021, revealed that EMIS in PICs have not progressed beyond the stages of collecting demographic data and generating basic indicators. Fiji EMIS which has prospect of leading other PICs EMIS could only generate few indicators manually, and the findings indicate that these indicators are not being considered in decision making. To solve these defects, we proposed data-driven microservices architecture developed with MERN (MongoDB, ExpressJS, ReactJS, and NodeJS) stack on 13 NoSQL collections, tested with pseudonymised data from Fiji Ministry of Education (consisting of 98.6% Learners, 100.2% Schools and 99.5% Teachers in post). Our solution renders dynamic visualized production-ready education data and 28 UNESCO standard indicators to guide decision making and this may serve as a model for PICs EMIS.