WAEC launches digital education statistics platform
West African Examinations Council (WAEC) has unveiled a new technology to ease access to quality data and give insights into Nigeria’s education sector.
Known as Educational Statistics (EDUSTAT), the application is an addition to the organisation’s list of technologies.
Head of National Office (HNO), Patrick Areghan, who spoke at the unveiling in Lagos, observed that the move was consistent with WAEC’s resolve to do things differently and move with current trends.
He explained that EDUSTAT was borne out of desire to provide stakeholders, including researchers, funding agencies, government institutions, school administrators and parents, with a reliable platform that provides educational insights.
Areghan said the educational insights were collected from multiple sources and delivered in simplified graphs, summaries and dashboards that would assist in enhancing decision-making.
He noted that the core benefit of the new technology was access to a comprehensive ‘interactive web report.’
Besides, the HNO said the innovation would end manual access to data by stakeholders, while also improving the quality of service delivery and generate more revenue for the examinations body.
He said for many stakeholders, lack of quality data had led to inconsistencies and offered multiple data copies in education, while for others, incorrect data and absence of analytics have led to false facts, resulting in bad decision making and loss of revenue in some cases.
Areghan said: “WAEC identified these issues and sought to solve the problem through its new EDUSTAT product, which addresses poor infrastructure and manual process of assessing educational insights and statistics. Council again leverages technology, detailed data analysis and insights to establish itself as a leading light in the educational sector and a future brand by introducing this educational statistical platform.
“As you all know, the new world is smarter and more instant. The access to statistical data analysis, its collation, interpretation and presentation cannot be different. Businesses, and organisations alike, need every edge and advantage they can get, to improve service delivery.”
Listing other benefits of the new technology, the HNO said the platform offers detailed and smart statistical insights into the education and assessment dynamics.
He continued: “One of the key features of this platform is its ability to analyse data in real-time. This means that educators can get immediate feedback on how their students are performing, enabling them to adjust their teaching strategies as needed.
“This implies EDUSTAT is an innovative educational statistic platform designed to leverage WAEC’s comprehensive and reliable database of over 50 million candidates who have been tested over the years.
“This platform results from years of research, development, collaboration and we are confident that it will revolutionise how data is accessed,” he said.
He stated that it offered a wide range of features that would benefit users, noting that for government agencies, it provided detailed statistics on student enrollment, graduation rates, and academic performance at various levels.
“For schools, the platform offers student-level data on academic performance, attendance, and demographic information.”
