Educational Management Information System: A Short Review

Educational data has allowed educational planners at school, national, and global institutions to perform data-driven decision-making, activity planning, and policy-making to ensure quality learning for its students can be achieved effectively and efficiently despite constraints in resources. As such, an Educational Management Information System (EMIS) has become a prominent tool for using data and processing it into meaningful information for educational planners to perform the right actions. Given that the system's use and features differ across the literature, this paper performs a short review of EMIS to guide future researchers in understanding the topic. In summary, EMIS differs based on the academic level covered, level of autonomy, actors involved, and capabilities that it can perform. The capabilities include (i) Data Entry and Repository, (ii) Evaluation and Report Generation, (iii) Decision-making and planning, and (iv) Learning/Teaching Management. Seven examples of EMIS are also discussed in this paper to gain further insight into its attributes. The review further shows that because of artificial intelligence-based technologies such as natural language processing, neural networks, big data, and knowledge-based systems, EMIS can assist planners in more efficient decision-making and planning when large datasets are considered, allowing them to gain insights that are typically difficult to obtain from traditional data analysis.