Startup EduTech helps the government of Costa Rica reduce school dropout and improve education

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The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that technology can be a powerful tool in education – online systems have allowed students to migrate to home schooling in weeks as governments try to contain the spread of virus. But much more can be done.

With high dropout rates, Costa Rica has engaged with Centro America’s EduTech startup to design, develop and implement a student enrollment and early warning system, which allows for the transmission of alerts. data that helps the education system respond to risks that may affect student outcomes. .

“In the first trimester [of 2020], 90,000 pupils were not in our schools because we went from a face-to-face service to a virtual service in order to be able to react very quickly ”, declared Rafael Ramirez Pacheco (photo, right), product manager at the Costa Rican Ministry of Education. “The idea was to locate where the students were and over the next four months we could reduce the dropout from 90,000 students to 18,000… students. After that, we launched another step to get these 18,000 students back to school. “

The project won the “Best innovative startup” Amazon Web Services Inc.

Pacheco and Joshua Montero (photo, left), Founder and President of Centro America’s EduTech, spoke with Nathalie Erlich, host of theCUBE, the live streaming studio of SiliconANGLE Media, at the AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards 2021. They discussed the problems facing the education system in Costa Rica, the vast technological program developed by EduTech and the goals that the program intends to achieve. (* Disclosure below.)

From paper-based data collection to the cloud

A major difficulty Costa Rica faced in coping with the high dropout rate was that the local education system relied on paper-based data collection.

“We would put the collected data together on paper and send it to the central office, and that would go into an Excel file,” Pacheco explained. “This [would] take about two months to process all this data and make decisions.

Thus, the first thing done with EduTech was to digitally record the number of students – it was possible to obtain enrollment data for 1,163,982 students, involving the entire educational population, both public and private. All data has been stored in the AWS Cloud.

With a file for each student, the government can track abstentions, as well as everything the student does during the different academic years, and thus design more suitable programs.

“We can identify the gaps, the weaknesses, and we can see what are the most appropriate programs to replicate that in the rest of the country,” said Pacheco.

One of the most important aspects of the program is that it involves students from all levels of education: kindergarten, preschool, primary, secondary, higher and technical. “We have reached all the sectors where the Ministry of Education has been able to detect the needs in the country,” he added.

AWS Rekognition for Undocumented Students

The program developed by EduTech for the Costa Rican Ministry of Education has eight stages and promises to integrate different types of technologies. One tool that will likely be adopted is AWS Recognition, to solve the problem of undocumented students.

As many students in the country do not have any type of identification, it is extremely difficult for the education system to monitor their attendance and performance. The idea is to use technology to recognize their faces or fingerprints, giving them identification, according to Montero.

“It’s amazing technology that allows the education ministry and students to have a voice, to have a presence even if they don’t have their actual documentation for some reason,” Montero said. “It can change people’s lives, and it can change the lives of students. “

Connectivity and cloud-based services are also tending to spread to other Costa Rican government agencies, and some ministries have already built in tools to manage COVID-19. The health ministry, for example, has a set of apps to identify people who test positive for the virus, which has enabled the education ministry to associate the situation with students in class, according to Pacheco.

“AWS has a set of services that allow us to focus on the problem rather than the solution or the technology, because the services are already available,” he concluded.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of the SiliconANGLE and theCUBE coverage of the AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards 2021. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the 2021 Global Public Sector Partner Awards. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the coverage sponsor of theCUBE event, nor other sponsors have editorial control over the content. on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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