Geospatial data science for planning education systems
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| Number of Parts | 351 | |
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| License | CC Attribution 3.0 Unported: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
| Identifiers | 10.5446/69096 (DOI) | |
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| Production Year | 2022 |
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00:00
PlanningSystem programmingRepresentation (politics)Exterior algebraPlanningPhysical system
00:34
PlanningSystem programmingPlanningAreaOffice suiteBitSampling (statistics)Level (video gaming)Context awarenessVideo gamePhysical systemGroup actionCollaborationismReal numberUniform resource locator
01:44
PlanningImplementationMereologyOpen sourceSoftwareRegulator geneUniform resource locatorImplementationOpen setSoftware developerRule of inferenceFreewareSoftware frameworkTheoryPlanningBridging (networking)Analytic setComputer animation
02:52
Data bufferFinitary relationGradientDistribution (mathematics)HypothesisPlanningBuildingComplex (psychology)Physical systemBoundary value problemCore dumpLevel (video gaming)Visualization (computer graphics)Student's t-testMultiplication signGradientLaptopDatabaseStaff (military)DataflowSystem administratorRight angleComputer animationEngineering drawing
04:26
Core dumpStrategy gameBinary multiplierFitness functionData analysisType theoryGroup actionFreewareChemical equationScaling (geometry)Validity (statistics)Right angleMoving averageTranslation (relic)Multiplication signCodeWave packetContext awarenessLevel (video gaming)Core dumpMathematical analysisElectronic program guideFocus (optics)BuildingEstimatorStandard deviationSoftware developerProduct (business)Point (geometry)BitShared memoryPhysical systemComputer animation
08:12
Programmer (hardware)Cellular automatonMappingSpring (hydrology)Single-precision floating-point formatGroup actionLevel (video gaming)Matching (graph theory)Binary multiplierPhysical systemEstimatorAreaOpen setService (economics)Range (statistics)Latent heat
08:56
Hazard (2005 film)Session Initiation ProtocolCellular automatonNetwork switching subsystemAreaCASE <Informatik>Internet service providerPlug-in (computing)Touch typingLink (knot theory)Service (economics)Computer animation
09:34
PlanningElement (mathematics)BitKey (cryptography)DistancePhysical systemMultiplication signAreaProjective planeInformationComputer animation
10:09
FreewareObject-oriented analysis and designProgrammer (hardware)PlanningGreen's functionLevel (video gaming)Graph (mathematics)CodeEstimatorInstance (computer science)SoftwareCASE <Informatik>IterationInformationPhysical systemOperator (mathematics)Computer animation
11:16
PlanningComputer programmingLinear regressionComputer animation
11:35
AreaFilm editingInformationDifferent (Kate Ryan album)CASE <Informatik>Process (computing)Computer programmingMultiplication signDecision theory
12:26
Model theoryRepository (publishing)Plug-in (computing)Uniform resource locatorComputer animation
12:42
BitUniform resource locatorFile format
13:03
Mathematical optimizationDigital electronicsContent (media)Multiplication signProcess (computing)Computer programmingFile formatBlind spot (vehicle)Digital electronicsExtension (kinesiology)Real numberMathematical optimizationComputer animation
13:34
Computer networkVariable (mathematics)Model theoryFrequencyNumberDigital electronicsMultiplication signVector potentialMathematical optimizationRevision controlDecision theoryInheritance (object-oriented programming)Computer animation
14:04
Open setNumberComputer animation
14:31
Physical systemPlanningMultiplication signNumberGoodness of fitProjective planeComputer animation
15:36
Channel capacityChannel capacityRight angleMereologyReading (process)Computer animation
16:29
Geometry
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
Thank you so much Luis. Hello everyone. Thanks for being here, for responding to this invitation that I made to you. Yes, I'm a demographer. I work at UNESCO's International Institute for Educational Planning. So this is not a talk about education as teaching GIS to people, but please stay. I'm also the UNESCO alternate representative to the UN-GGIM, so you might have seen me there.
00:28
I label this talk, Geospatial Data Science for Planning Education System. But in reality, I could have said something like, planning education system with FUS4G, because this is really what it is about.
00:41
The good thing with being here with you today is that I don't need to explain what is geospatial data. But I actually might need to explain a bit what is educational planning. So I'll start with that and then I'll tell you a bit how and why we completely transitioned to FUS4G in the context of that work.
01:01
And finally I'll show you a sample of the tools that we developed over the last few years and tell you about the challenges that we have and opportunities for collaboration. So when I try to explain what is micro planning to people, I kind of tell that it's like playing SimCity, but in real life and with education only. So our target users are really technical officers in ministries of education, either
01:27
at the central level in a capital or in district offices or decentralized offices. And because we work at the micro level, so school level or at the most district level, we call this area micro planning.
01:40
And so micro planning is really at the intersection of policy and implementation, location and community. So basically we're trying to take the legal frameworks and the rules and the regulations in a country and a ministry of education and apply them as efficiently as possible to the realities of the communities.
02:04
And so we try to kind of bridge theory and practice and location and people. And so we're really a small team. Herman and I are the most visible part of the team, so many of you know us already. But we have a bunch of colleagues that also work more on the research side.
02:23
So my team is really the development, like experimental development, but we do back up our experimental development with research and analytical reviews. The way that we work is that we try to be as collaborative as possible and we really rely on open source
02:44
software and free open source software, but also on free literature, open literature, open data, so that everyone can replicate what we do. The micro planning or educational planning has started decades ago. The institute was founded in 1963 and since then we've been working on micro planning and building these education systems with geography.
03:06
But at the time there was no ArcGIS, there was no QGIS, there was no databases in the way that we understand them today. And there were no individual laptops in ministries of education. So now we have a great potential to really look at the old practices and completely review them to make them more efficient today.
03:31
The challenge that we had in the past, we still have them, some of them at least. We work with boundaries that are not always super clear because they're not administrative, they're education relevant.
03:43
We work with concepts as flows of students between primary, secondary, tertiary education, technical education. Typically a student will go from one grade to the next and never come back, but yet they might drop out and come back in. And so that's kind of adding a level of complexity.
04:01
And this is only for students because we have the teachers, we have the inspectors, we have ministry staff and so forth. So it's not always very simple, but it's always fun. So these are some of the nice old visualizations from the 70s that I always like to bring up because people were doing this stuff by hand. So we have to acknowledge the effort, right?
04:24
The fuss for GE in general is really at the core of our work because, well, we have a small team so we cannot do it alone, of course. And typically not all ministries of education have a fully dedicated team to geospatial data analysis,
04:41
or that their team, if they have one, is not fully trained or spending 100% of their time on this. So we have to make sure that we really reach as many people as possible. So that's why FOSS-4G is super interesting, that we can really share to as many people as possible and have this kind of tipping point or critical mass of people that can use the tools and the data work that we will do.
05:06
And also remain independent, remain autonomous. What we say with the Sustainable Development Goals, of course we're targeting SDG-4 on education, but I always say that we work on SDG-4 by way of SDG-16, right, strengthening institutions.
05:22
And this is what our work is about. So the tools that we create, we want them to be data-light because we want as many people to be able to use them, but documentation-heavy, so we try to really give every detail on how to use the tools that we develop, like a step-by-step guide, and we want to make sure that anyone can be really autonomous in using all these tools.
05:46
Of course we provide training and we provide support for users, but anyone can work on this alone. We want our work to be replicable, and so that's why we engage also with code check, that will go through our codes and give us this validation that our code is totally replicable.
06:05
But we want our work also to be customizable, so we want everyone to look at what is the tool, the package providing, but we want them to customize. It's like if we were providing a recipe, but the Ministry of Education is choosing the ingredients. And so that's kind of the metaphor I found to explain what type of balance we find between standards and basic,
06:27
viable analysis and the relevance to the context. All of this allows us to have a fast rollout, an easy rollout, and we want, I mean that's the objective, right,
06:41
we don't want things to lag, and also providing a minimal cost. So next I'm going to show you a bit a few of the products that we prepared over the last two years, I would say. You know, some people go to Phosphorgy because it's free, free of cost, like free beer,
07:02
but this first product, I mean, I really pushed for it because I was just annoyed with people using bad estimations. And so these are my free puppies, right, you saw this conference yesterday. And so one of the challenges that we have in education is that we need to know where are the learners,
07:21
but we need to know where are the appropriate learners for the appropriate educational level that we are providing. Translation, it means that if I'm building a primary education in Turkey, I need to focus on a four-year age group of people because primary education in Turkey is four years.
07:41
If I work in Ireland, anyone from Ireland? Well, primary education is lasting eight years, so I need to make sure that the population that I'm targeting is eight-year age group. Now, most of the population that we have available at a large scale or even nationally in many countries is provided by five-year age groups.
08:02
And so that's a problem because it doesn't fit at all the education system, but yet, you know, it seems that everyone is using these anyway. So basically what we do is that we take world pop specialized estimates by five-year age groups to which we apply spring multipliers, which is available in open access,
08:20
and so we specialize specific school age population based on the exact age ranges of the education system. So this means that we can do very specific estimates for catchment areas, for districts, for provinces, and know for pre-primary, primary, secondary, whatever educational level you want to look at,
08:41
even for single years of age, of course. Now, this is a province in Madagascar, and when you work with this population estimates, it's cool because you can then, you know, match it with UNOSAT, happen mapping services when there is a disaster, and you can, oops, yeah, and you can use this twist and actually identify which area were flooded next to a cyclone,
09:05
after a cyclone, and really target the schools that are in these areas and provide remedial services to primary school, or in this case, the whole school age population in that area. As a note, I will, you will see that you have all the links to the papers, to the QGIS plugins,
09:26
and to the GitHub, and in any case, you will have my contact at the end if you want to get in touch. So another tool that we worked on is catchment areas. This is one of the key elements that we need when we plan an education system,
09:41
because we need to make sure that, well, learners that live around the school have actual access to that school. We focused on walking distance, walking time mostly, and we want to make sure also that that school is big enough to host all the people that live around it. If you were in Riku's session this morning, you heard a bit about this project,
10:03
and it's really nice because it allows you to actually not only generate information on how far, or how long does it take for children to walk to school, so this is by like 15 minutes iteration, so the dark green is 15 minutes, and then half an hour, 45 minutes, and a full hour,
10:22
but it allows you to also see, you know, how accessible is your school system. If your learners need to walk an hour, then the same experience as if they walk 15 minutes. This tool relies on the road network, so we take the road network from OSM, then we sass out our graph upper and AWS instances with Gizpo,
10:45
and then we run the code that is on QGIS on a plug-in. But in some cases, you know, the road network is not available, so what do we do? We just drop it? No. We organize a mapathon or a campaign with OSM and UN mappers, so that we can really build this road network together, and then run the estimations for the ministry.
11:06
It's really cool because the Madagascar ministry is already using these estimates for the next, the coming school year, so it already has an impact, because it's so easy to use. Then, well, when we run programs in education, we want any ministry ready,
11:23
and we want to make sure that these programs are efficient, and we want to know where they have an impact, and so running geographically weighted regressions allows us to see where programs have the most impact. So what we did in this case in Colombia is that we looked at the relationship between school feeding programs and learning assessment scores,
11:42
and so we could see that the school feeding programs were more efficient on increasing the attendance and then the learning scores in different areas. So it means that should that program be re-conducted the year after, well, the ministry might want to focus in areas where it really has an impact.
12:03
Maybe cut in some areas where it has no impact or maintain it, but maybe roll it out at a different pace. So we just, I mean, we do all this to inform decisions, right? We don't say cut this, do this, whatever, but it's really to kind of add some information in the decision-making process.
12:20
Voila! I'm not sure about the time, I think I have some more. We are also very cognizant of the fact that climate is changing, it has impact on our structures, and so we have this MCDA model that should be online on the plugin repository next month
12:41
that allows the ministry to identify the most suitable locations on the territory, or where to build a new school, but also to identify the locations that are a bit more hazardous so that we can maintain the existing schools with the right mediation so that the schools can remain in functioning format.
13:05
This is a cool one. You know, in education you have these inspectors or supervisors, right? They go and visit the schools once in a while to make sure that the teachers teach well, or that the curriculum is well, or that the school itself is maintained in school improvement programs. And so one of the challenges that literature tells us is that inspectors do their job,
13:26
but they really lack time to visit, or they lack the resources to actually get to the school, and to this extent they're a real blind spot for education. And so we work on these optimization circuits for the inspectors. It's super challenging. The model, like, it's probably twice this kind of decision making,
13:44
because there are so many different variables to take into account, but this is a really cool one. We don't have publications scheduled, so still time to contribute to version one, but this has a really great potential in improving the number of schools that get visited,
14:02
or the frequency at which schools get visited. And this is another one, and perhaps this is the last one I will show, and it's interesting because it seems, as per literature and research in open access tell us, is that there's a relationship between rainfall and the number of school days that children can spend in school,
14:24
and their scores in learning or exams, let's say. So basically the idea is to look at how the rainy days are distributed in a calendar year, and see if a tweak in the school calendar could actually increase the number of good learning days in school,
14:43
and therefore might have an impact on learning. And so this is super experimental, still time to contribute, and it's really kind of challenging the historical, colonial, and traditional ways of thinking about school and school calendars.
15:03
Now this is the time for my inspirational quote. Yesterday I heard advice like, be a good ancestor, that's really cool. Be brave, I heard. Yanni said, be brave. My, it's not, I mean, you take inspiration if you want, but I'm thinking that using Phosphorgy is really a revolutionary act.
15:24
We're challenging the existing system every time that we collaborate, and every time that we contribute to a project. And so that's why the work that we do in educational planning is so exciting. It's because it's really affirming our capacity to contribute,
15:41
and our capacity to, I mean, recognizing also our interdependence. Now this second part, I mean, the first part is my, you can quote, and then the second part is from Sylvia Federici, an Italian philosopher that I was reading on my way here. And so I think we should remain in this posture that we are really changing the world,
16:03
and as Federici is saying in the book that I'm reading right now, is that when you are next to an erupting volcano, it really shows that working collaboratively and together makes this new world, this changing world, this more common world a reality.
16:25
And so I thought I would leave you on that thought, and I would be happy to connect, take some questions maybe, or continue online. Thank you.