Malaysia’s Ministry of Education oversees primary and secondary school education across the nation. It is driven by the Malaysia Education Blueprint, launched by the Government in 2013.
Recently, the Ministry has driven initiatives geared at increasing technology capabilities and e-services for students and educators. This is to achieve the goals, laid out in the Malaysia Education Blueprint, including:
- Universal access and full enrollment of all children from preschool to upper secondary school by 2020.
- Improvement of student scores on international assessments such as PISA to the top third of participating countries within 15 years.
- Reduce by half the current urban-rural, socio-economic and gender achievement gaps by 2020.
The education system in Malaysia is organised is like so: there are more than 30 divisions in the Ministry covering key curricula and key educational services.
Malaysia has 16 State Education Departments spanning across the country, each with District Level Education Offices.
Under these District Level Education Offices are the schools. Malaysia boasts more than 10,000 schools nationwide serving 2,899,000 primary students and 2,546,000 secondary students.
We wanted to find out more about how the Ministry drove digital transformation throughout primary and secondary education throughout Malaysia.
OpenGov recently spoke to Mrs. Azizah Binti Bakar, Under Secretary, Information Management Division, Ministry of Education, Malaysia who recently arrived to the Ministry from MAMPU. Mrs. Azizah told us about how their Ministry is driving the department to adapt to technology and e-services, thus integrating ICT in schools nationwide.
To get a better understanding, we asked how the Education Technology Division and Information Management Division are distinguished from each other.
The Education Technology Division from the Ministry is managing teaching and learning throughout the schools. Whereas, the Information Management Division acts as an enabler of ICT. They work to provide applications and infrastructure for ICT development.
MAMPU provides the infrastructure for ICT from the Ministry Level until the District Level, this is where the Information Management Division steps in. As for Data Centre Capacity, that is a different story for the Ministry of Education, who is looking to transition to MAMPU’s 1Gov Data Centre.
“MAMPU also has the 1Gov Data Centre, but we are hosting our data centre here and have yet to join it,” said Mrs. Azizah, “We are working to make this transition within the next year.”
As for E-Services, MOE has an array of platforms which they provide to their divisions based on need.
“MOE has a lot of applications. We facilitate and host different systems for each division to conduct its day to day work,” said Mrs. Azizah, “In terms of managing schools and the educators, we have developed most of those systems and applications in house.”
Driving a Citizen-Centric Approach in 2016
For 2016, Mrs. Azizah sees the exposure of frontier technology having a great impact on the Ministry. She would also like to see E-Services become more accessible and streamlined for end users.
“Service oriented architecture is not new… but we need to reorient ourselves towards that architecture,” said Mrs. Azizah, “There are hundred or more applications which can be consolidated, integrated, or streamlined. We could implement data sharing, which we have done for 28 applications, this is so people are provided new insights that would help them work better.”
To further improve access, Mrs. Azizah proposes implementing single sign-on for users with multiple applications.
Mrs. Azizah is new to her role but comes with great experience from MAMPU and is not a stranger to her duties at the Ministry of Education.
It will be exciting to see how she progresses over the year, aiming to further integrate ICT in Malaysia’s primary and secondary education system.
