Helping Education with Open Data in Mexico
I never blog about my job at IIIEPE and what we (or I) do here. I’ll do it know because I think it is relevant.
More than a year ago we created (and I coded it) a website made with Drupal: Coleccion SíaEducacion is a digital repository specialized in Education. We created it to solve one big problem, the local department of Education in the State of Nuevo Leon, which has more than 40,000 teachers, needs to constantly distribute several documents to those teachers in 4000+ schools; some of those documents are administrative documents, some of them have educational content. Before Colección SiaEducación, they were doing it with CDs and DVDs. With 4000+ schools you can imagine the size of problem.
With Coleccion SiaEducacion teachers now have a central location where they can locate and download the documents they need when they need them, usually in multiple and open formats, and the administrative authorities publish information when they need it. Also, any teacher who wants to contribute and publish documents can do it by requesting access.
Coleccion SiaE (as we call it at IIIEPE), saves hundreds if not thousands of hours a year burning CDs and DVDs. Saves hundreds of hours to the teachers locating a file inside 10 CDs with no search engine. Saves thousands of pesos ($) by eliminating the need to burn CDs and eliminating the shipping process at all. Finally, since we have a really good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Google indexes everything and those documents are easier to find and are available to everyone out there who’s interested.
The website is running across 3 servers running on Linux, some of the technologies we use are Apache Solr as our Search Engine, and Memcache and Varnish to handle the traffic. Right now, the traffic is around 4000 page views a day. Is not a lot but is not a regular blog, our statistics say the traffic increases during school-time and we’re starting to see an increase in traffic if we compare it with last year when we launched.
I can’t finish without mentioning that we open sourced a few components back to the Drupal community while making Coleccion SiaE because at IIIEPE believe in Open Source.
Colección Sía Educación is an amazing project and we expect it to grow as more schools jump in and start using it. If you want more information, please contact me on Twitter @lelizondo