The National Institute of Education (NIE) on August 31 signed a memorandum of understanding with Poscar Digital Co Ltd and announced the launch of the “Wiki School” digital school system to improve leadership, management and good governance and assist digital learning and teaching programmes in the Kingdom.

Speaking during the launch event, Minister of Education, Youth and Sport Hang Chuon Naron said the collaboration initially began in 2018 and continued during Covid-19 with the introduction of many digital features to enable students to learn online.

“The introduction of this system not only strengthens student learning but also school management, making schools more accountable to students and parents and making teachers more accountable to school administrators as well,” he said.

“This platform is very important for transforming the digital education system. Teachers can use it to teach classes remotely during school hours using Zoom or Google Switch and administrators have the ability to monitor the teachers’ online classroom,” he said.

The minister said a number of private companies have also implemented digital school management systems including mobile apps with similar goals, such as Preah Sisowath High School’s New Generation School system. Toul Tompong High School and some other private schools have also started using these systems.

Ngorn Moi, co-founder of Poscar Co Ltd, said Wiki School was developed by a team of Cambodian technology experts with backgrounds in areas like education, computers, database systems and networking.

The establishment of this system, he said, was to help schools by giving them the ability to quickly manage their various reports digitally and reduce the need for printing reports by using push notifications from the Wiki School mobile app.

“Wiki School has a vision to create a digital school system in Cambodia. Our mission is to connect all schools in Cambodia digitally while upholding the values of the company’s leaders who have nearly 20 years of expertise and experience in education and information technology,” he said.

He added that his company has cooperated to set up a wiki school system and digital presence tools at the education ministry, Royal School of Administration and New Generation School, among others.

His company is also working with the ministry to provide distance learning programmes covering everything from primary to high school levels, and the company also has projects underway in the higher education sector as well.

NIE director Sieu Sovanna confirmed that Poscar has created the management system for the digital school programmes at the institution.

As part of their contract, Poscar has built an impressive digital infrastructure for the NIE with a management system that can store data on its servers without needing to archive for an estimated seven years along with four more servers to support digital presence operations.

“The company plans to spend $120,000 on the installation of the management system for Wiki School, including the four digital presence servers that will run the server-side programmes.

“We are also training NIE managers to use the digital education system and providing technical support as part of the collaboration,” he said.