The Department of School Education & Literacy of India’s Education Ministry has proposed a plan for creating an ‘Education Ecosystem Registry’ (EER) to provide a unified system for stakeholders to track learner outcomes and inform policy-making processes in the education sector. The consultation for ‘Design and Architecture Framework for Education Ecosystem Registry’ under the National Digital Education Architecture (NDEAR) policy is open for public feedback until April 17, 2023, and comments can be submitted via this Google form. The National Education Technology Forum (NETF), in the EER consultation paper, pitches for the creation of interoperable registries—which can be accessed and reused reciprocally—for schools, colleges, universities, teachers, educators, and administrators. Currently, the student, teacher, and institution data, as the paper highlights, are “owned and maintained within standalone siloed systems and periodically updated”. The data in these systems is not updated on a real-time basis, is not easily reusable by other systems, and runs the risk of being edited or tampered with when obtained by others. The proposed registry system aims to unify the existing disconnected infrastructure, and enable decentralized management to tackle challenges like access, record-keeping, tracking academic journey, authentication, etc., in the education sector. The paper also outlines some of the immediate challenges in implementing the plan such as privacy and data security risks, pushbacks by states and institutions, unavailability of NDEAR compliant registries, implementation risks, etc., and offers temporary solutions for them. References for design principles The framework for the Education Ecosystem Registry (EER) is largely based on the…
