Role of Management Information System (MIS) in Education Sector

Data is the lifeline of every educational institution. Right from the student turnover rate to the financial records, every piece of data that is/was ever associated with the college paves way for its development. The bigger the institution, the greater the volume of data, which makes it challenging to manage on paper or even with excel files.

Today, most of the higher education institutions are looking for an optimum distribution of resources and services to yield maximum benefits to students, teachers, and the management alike. In this world of ballooning educational demands, Management Information System (MIS) is just what these institutions need to propel their progress in the right direction.

What is Education Management Information System (EMIS)?

The word MIS itself is self-explanatory. A Management Information System or MIS is a central data repository capable of not only gathering, organizing and storing data but also processing and analyzing it and generating various reports from it. This is MIS in a broader sense.

Education Management Information System (EMIS) is specially designed to monitor the performance of education programs offered by the institute and to manage the distribution and allocation of educational resources. Of course, in the field of education, EMIS has specific roles to help an educational institution grow.

Nowadays many higher education institutions are looking forward to implementing comprehensive education management solution to align academic processes and deliver better student experience.

Students

Students are at the heart of an educational institution. EMIS stores crucial student data such as personal data, exam records, and even hostel and library details. Additionally, it keeps track of the day-to-day progress of students which is eventually used to analyze and monitor the improvements or retrogression in students over-time.

This is a comprehensive approach as compared to the legacy database where the stored data was incapable of providing real-time crucial insights and consequently aiding the institution in better and timely decision-making.

For instance, in India, many colleges have implemented an online attendance management system MIS, which has helped them in increasing the attendance percentage of students. Colleges affirm that the MIS system is user-friendly and readily accessible, which has also aided them in improving productivity by deploying workflow-based systems.

For Teachers

Same goes for data pertaining to the educators as well. In a developing education institution, the progress of its educators is equally imperative for them as well as the institution itself. Educators need to deploy technology to gain in-depth knowledge about student behavior and make the most out of the time and resources available to provide maximum aid to the students.

An MIS helps track faculty data such as attendance, and performance. But, more importantly, an MIS reduces the workload on teachers by providing quick access to data on any student or a group of students which can be drilled-down, filtered, and arranged accordingly within a few clicks.

For the Management

Ease of tracking and analyzing resource distribution and expenditures is one of the biggest reasons for any top-level management of an educational institution to look forward to implementing an MIS system. By resources, we mean everything that the management invests in: right from assets and infrastructure to study aids and educators.

Additionally, the management can fully control which teacher, faculty and staff have access to what kind of data. For instance, sparing the staff in-charge of finances, the management can lock the students' financial records from all the other users or alternatively, academic performance data can be hidden from the staff.

Conclusion
Any type, kind and size of an educational institution require a user-friendly and efficient MIS system to take the institution a step further in the right direction and to boost student success. No matter what the core needs, every forward-thinking campus must implement an ERP to fully utilize and efficiently track their resources and make appropriate decisions.