Enhancing Decision Support for Secondary Education with OLAP

Abstract

Decision-making is one of the most critical processes taking place in a modern school. It is a necessary competence for school administrators and managerial staff especially in Education Directorates who often have to make decisions regarding the implementation of education strategies and policies. It is also important for teaching staff and school curriculum designers in order to plan teaching methods and monitor student performance. Nowadays many school functions are supported by dedicated information systems. Business Intelligence (BI) is a widely used set of techniques and tools for the transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes. They include Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) in order to provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Schools in secondary education can be viewed as small organizations where effective decision making is required at many areas and levels. The aim of this project is the research of feasibility of applying OLAP Decision Support Systems in Education and Education Management, any possible benefits as well as possible enhancements. The outcome is the design and implementation of an enhanced OLAP system applied in a specific educational setting based on our case study.