By Peter Oluka

Elon Musk’s SpaceX’s Starship rocket — which could one day carry humans to the moon and Mars — made it some four minutes and 24 miles into the sky before it exploded during its inaugural test flight last Thursday.

And yet, even as they watched the world’s largest rocket burst into a fireball, SpaceX engineers still roared with cheers and applause.

The launch was hailed as “a real accomplishment” and “so successful”.

Why?

“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary,” SpaceX later tweeted.

SpaceX said before the mission that “any data it yielded would be valuable as long as the rocket cleared the launch pad” — which it did.

This is where the lessons come from – SpaceX engineers went for the ‘data’, not necessarily for the Starship Rocket to hit the moon and/or Mars on the first launch. Now they have the data, expect them to be more accurate in the next launch!

The Need for accurate data:

Data helps a company redefine its strategy, increase their revenue and profits by making the company more efficient, providing key insights into operations and customer satisfaction and helping to improve certain processes.

Data can help businesses measure whether certain actions, products or services are profitable and where their greatest expenses might be. Identifying expenses is often the key to increasing profits because businesses can reduce those expenses and keep more of the revenue they earn. Raw data helps the company identify where it can trim expenses, increase efforts and earn more revenue.

Again, that is why stakeholders in the education sector in Nigeria were full of praise for the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) and its technology partners, Sidmach Technologies, following the development of Edustat platform.

I tell you why: Data plays a critical role in problem-solving for company leaders. With an abundance of data, company leaders can identify and address key problems and monitor the effects of proposed solutions.

Solving problems can be much easier and solutions are more effective when the person solving that problem has sufficient information. Understanding the problem in its entirety is typically the first step toward solving that problem.

That is why the SpaceX team didn’t bury their heads in sand when the Spaceship Rocket ‘failed’. Are you in the EdTech space in Nigeria? Edustat presents you with a dataset to rave-up your products/services.

Edustat is a data and Artificial Intelligence-driven analytics platform that offers rich and unique smart statistical insights into education and assessment in West Africa using historical and current data to provide detailed intelligence for stakeholders across the globe in a smart and easily accessible manner. It offers a variety of rich, interactive educational assessment statistics, and insights, in graphs, summaries, tables, trends and interactive dashboards for intelligence, research, and informed decision-making in just a few clicks.

WAEC, in partnership with Sidmach, developed Edustat with ease of use in mind. So, it was built for users to easily sign up, and select the kind of report or intelligence they seek, with an array of filters to filter down the expected result by age, gender, demography, and even special needs amongst many other options of filters.

Values Edustat offers users

Everyone can benefit from Edustat, but let’s highlight a few: Researchers/academics (PhD students, professorship, masters) – We all know it is usually difficult to access accurate data that cover education statistics in gender, disabilities, regions, male/female and other indexes. Researchers will have cause to smile because Edustat contains more than just statistical numbers; you are assured of infographics.

The team infused a summary of any insight or report you generate using Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools.

The opportunities are numerous. Governments at all levels – Federal, State, LGA; MDAs, are welcome to use Edustat.

For instance, the Ogun State Government wants to assess the state’s performance in SSCE over the years. They can compare their State with other States for developmental planning, and interventions (in case the students are not doing well in certain subjects like English, Mathematics, etc).

A State Government that pays WAEC fees its students would cherish having accurate data on their performances.

Funding Agencies – The World Bank, UNESCO, DFID, etc., who are looking for reliable data for interventions for scholarships, erect classrooms/ this will help for informed decisions.

Schools are not left out. Schools would want to know how they perform in WAEC; maybe for the bragging rights of 9As or other achievements. This will help them compare with other schools. They can track how their female students are performing; how the students (generally) are doing per subject; juxtapose their performance to others.

The team really worked hard to integrate AI Predictive Modelling, so schools shall be able to predict how students will perform in future high school assessments – known as WAEC school exams.

Also, Parents who moved to new locations do not know which School to pick for their kids. Worry not; you can assess schools’ performance in WAEC through Edustat.

Private Corporate/Individuals – Any company that does anything on Education like Edcent, uLesson, Edusko, will help them build, and scale up their products, contents, or solutions around subjects.

They can ascertain how candidates perform in each subject in real time.

It is a web-based application for now, but it can be assessed from any device, Laptop, Phone, Tablet etc. It is adaptive to any device and provides everyone with the same experience across all devices.

Edustat offers Pay Per Report. What that means is that you only need to pay for the insight/report you are seeking per time.

But again, with the ease of use in mind, the team built the product with a wallet system which allows users to fund their wallets with sufficient funds which allows them to pay for the statistics/reports/insights they seek by drawing funds from their funded wallet automatically.

So, what are you waiting for, sign up on Edustat (https://waec.edustat.ng/) today!

Peter Oluka is the Editor of TechEconomy