The school monitoring system is a mobile-phone based data collection system using RapidSMS that collects data about schools from school administrators and people who work closely with schools. Head teachers and other administrators who work closely with the schools send data into the system using their mobile phones based on a proposed schedule for data collection. Data is sent into the system on a regular basis like weekly for pupil attendance, monthly for reports on child abuse and termly for capitation grants made to the schools. Other data that can be collected by the education monitoring system include data on teacher attendance, presense of amenities such as hygienic facilities at schools.
The Education monitoring application is closely linked and some of its data is directly drawn from Ureport (www.ureport.ug) - a community focused social monitoring tool from which RapidSMS-EMIS mines for education related issues sent in by youth in their communities.
Technically speaking, RapidSMS-EMIS leverages the work of rapidsms-script (github.com/daveycrockett/rapidsms-script/) to provide an easy system for automated conversation-like communication between the rapidsms-emis application, teachers and other education specialists and administrators.
- Python 2.7 (www.python.org/download/) : On linux machines, you can usually use your system's package manager to perform the installation
- MySQL or PostgreSQL are recommended
- All other python libraries will be installed as part of the setup and configuration process
- Some sort of SMS Connectivity, via an HTTP gateway. By default, Rapidsms-EMIS comes configured to work with a two-way clickatell number (see http://www.clickatell.com/downloads/http/Clickatell_HTTP.pdf and http://www.clickatell.com/downloads/Clickatell_two-way_technical_guide.pdf). Ideally, you want to obtain a local short code in your country of operation, or configure Rapidsms-EMIS to use a GSM modem (see http://docs.rapidsms.org for more information on how to do this).