Driving evidence-based improvement in education with AI-enriched analytics

The National Agency for Education (NAE) is a public administration body established by the Ministry of Education, Sport, and Science of the Republic of Lithuania. The Agency manages education within the country through efforts such as ensuring inclusive educational practices, organizing professional development programs for teachers, assessing student performance, and more.

As part of its responsibilities, the NAE collects school management reports to monitor the state of education for each school, municipality, and at the national level. Every year, around 3,000 new reports are submitted, containing a mix of structured and unstructured data and stored in a wide variety of file types. Just extracting raw data from each report, which is 10 pages long on average, took around four hours of manual labor—a completely unsustainable workload for the NAE.

In parallel, the NAE found it difficult to compare the reports with other data such as student registration rates and funding, which made it hard to gain a holistic overview of school performance. Aiming to give education leaders more time to review results and create data-driven policy recommendations, the Agency sought a document ingestion and analysis automation solution.

Working with IBM Business Partner S2P, the NAE chose IBM watsonx.ai© and IBM Cognos® Analytics technologies as the basis for an AI-enriched automation solution.

S2P built a solution to extract data from multiple source documents in different formats and deliver consolidated analytics according to 14 different client-designated KPIs. Initially, the raw data is extracted, transformed and inserted into a vector database. As the second step, IBM watsonx.ai processes the information according to reporting requirements. Then, the AI evaluates the information and delivers a figure for each KPI on a scale of zero to three, taking into account things such as each school’s use of innovative learning techniques. These KPIs provide the agency with evidence on which to base policy decisions.

Once all the information is loaded into a structured database, the pool of data can be compared with other structured data from the national Education Management System, which sources information from over 40 different registers. All of this data is then fed into Cognos Analytics, creating a series of dashboards to help NAE executives visualize the performance of the national education system.

“This innovative project would not have been possible without S2P’s dedication and expertise,” comments Eduardas Daujotis, Director of Administration at the Information Resources Department at NAE.

With a solution built on IBM watsonx.ai and IBM Cognos Analytics technology, NAE has eliminated the previous manual data extraction process, for a 99% boost in productivity. At the same time, by streamlining the analytics process, the Agency can effortlessly compare pools of data across systems to contextualize the performance of each school and municipality.

As the solution gathers more data every year, the NAE will be able to track the performance of the whole educational system year on year, unlocking deep insight into this crucial social service. The gathered data will also allow for more accurate and proactive decision-making in shaping the future of Lithuania’s education system.

“Thanks to S2P and IBM technology, we can confidently continue on our mission to improve the education system of Lithuania through data-driven decision-making,” concludes Daujotis.

The National Agency for Education is a public administration body established by the Ministry of Education, Sport, and Science of the Republic of Lithuania. The Agency officially began its work on 1 September 2019, following the merger of six institutions which were National Examination Center, National School Evaluation Agency, Center for Special Pedagogy and Psychology, Education Supply Center, Center for Information Technology in Education, and the Center for The Development of Education.

Established in 2009 and headquartered in Vilnius, S2P is a leading IBM Business Partner in Lithuania. The company provides specialized corporate performance management and business intelligence solutions to both public and private organizations.