(Montreal) Quebec’s education network enters the 21and century with the computerization of its data, which can now be analyzed with the help of digital intelligence.
Posted at 3:12 p.m.
The Minister of Education, Jean-François Roberge, and his colleague Éric Caire, responsible for Cybersecurity and Digital, announced on Monday an investment of 10.6 million over two years aimed at digitizing all the data accumulated by school service centers (CSS).
Pilot projects have already been implemented in certain CSSs and the results are promising. Thus, at the CSS Cœur-des-Vallées, in Outaouais, and Val-des-Cerfs, in Estrie, the use of digital intelligence has made it possible to prevent academic failure by detecting, with a rate greater than 90%, students most at risk of dropping out as soon as they arrive in secondary 1. The project also made it possible to bring together students with a similar profile or facing similar challenges to offer them support corresponding to their specific needs.
Also, the two CSSs have succeeded, thanks to this approach, in better redistributing their human resources according to the needs of different schools and in accurately predicting future staff shortages according to job categories and adjusting their recruitment accordingly.
The three priority areas of analysis will target student absenteeism and academic success, human resource needs and infrastructure maintenance operations.
These data, which will be anonymized – or denominalized, according to the expression of the ministry – can be processed and analyzed thanks, among other things, to dashboards.
This digitization and analysis effort is carried out with the help of the Quebec Institute of Artificial Intelligence (MILA), the International Observatory on the Societal Impacts of Artificial and Digital Intelligence (OBVIA) and the GRICS company, specialized in information technology in the field of education.