Azerbaijan, Baku, September 8 / Trend H. Valiyev /
Azerbaijan's secondary schools database is to be updated, the head of the Azerbaijani Ministry of Education's Training Information Management System (TIMS), Ismail Sadigov, told Trend on Wednesday.
Sadigov said that there are 1.5 million pupils and 168,000 employees in Azerbaijan's secondary schools system. All information about pupils and teachers is held in the TIMS database which includes detailed information about staff, students, the structure of educational institutions, training programs and plans, and other data.
The database allows for a direct flow of information from schools to the Ministry of Education.
Meanwhile, one of the main issues facing Azerbaijan's secondary schools is computerization, Sadigov said. The next stage in a program of computerization was launched in May.
This year, the ministry plans to connect secondary schools in district centers to the Internet.
An agreement was reached Wednesday with Microsoft, which has expressed willingness to create the necessary licensed versions of software products on a preferential basis to schools. Intel is working on a pilot to sell netbooks to schools on credit.
According Education Ministry statistics, there is now one computer for every 20 pupils in Azerbaijan, 60 times more than there was five years ago when there was only one computer for every 1,036 pupils in the country.
Roughly 16 million manat will be spent to computerize schools this year with much of the money spent on providing 500 schools with a high-speed Internet connection and on teacher training.
The Education Ministry's aim to create a unified educational-information space to improve the quality of education and to integrate Azerbaijan into the global system of education. The outcome will be the effective management of the country's education system, as well as creating contacts with foreign educational institutions via the Internet.