Education System Architecture

The most common definition of Architecture has to do with buildings, but in some professional circles, it has to do with the design of any complex system. In this context we hear about software architects, product architects, systems architects etc. A branch of architecture specifically relevant to education is Enterprise Architecture, which deals with the ways to build and maintain an active organization, situated in a dynamic environment.

The architect's role is to see the system as a whole, how it relates to its environment, and how its components relate to each other.

Any state's education system is definitely complex enough to warrant an architectural approach. An education system has a complex environment: Social trends, technology, politics, law, parents, pupils, teachers as individuals and unions, and probably more. Any education system is complex in itself, containing physical schools and classes, school administration tools and people, teaching methods and plans, teaching materials planning and production, testing methods and administration, control structures for the whole system including governmental agencies, regional authorities and local schools, financing methods, financial controls, IT infrastructure in the individual schools, IT infrastructure for the control structure, internal assessment and feedback mechanisms, teachers education and probably much more.

Let's consider the design of an education system as an architecture undertaking:

Suitability for the tasks

Having described the desired graduate of the education system - or indeed after putting much more thought into the issue - the education system has to be designed so that it tends to produce such graduates. The design has to take account of resources, most notably - financial limitations. Another major test for the suitability of the system, is its ability to correctly interact with all external stakeholders mentioned above.

Adaptability

The environment in which the 21st century education system is functioning, is extremely dynamic. If the system is not very flexible and adaptable, it will start losing its relevance as soon as it is set up. After a decade, we would need to start the discussion from the beginning: "What type of an education system do we need?" This would not be fun, so we have to design the education system so that it adapts to the rapid changes outside. Adaptability is such a basic requirement these days, that it could be placed together with "producing the desired graduates" at the top of the suitability category.

Maintainability

If Adaptability describes flexibility towards the outside world, Maintainability mean the same in relation to the internal structure of the system. The system (and it doesn't matter if we are talking about an Education System or a Software System) must be designed so that its components can be changed, without breaking the system. For a system to be maintainable, its structure has to be well understood. To achieve that, it's best of the components and their interactions well documented. Also, to determine what is going on within the system, in order to decide what changes and corrections are necessary, the various functions of the system need to be testable. (Being testable and being well-understood are related.) To be testable, a system has to contain inherent "test points": Places in the system where it can be probed and looked at, without interfering much with its overall activity. This is very common in electronic hardware design: Looking at electronic printed circuit boards, one often sees metal points and even metal hooks, designed to connect external testing devices. The analog in the world of enterprise or education system architecture, are observation and measurement mechanisms. Financial auditing is such a mechanism. System-wide or school-wide tests and surveys can be used. Passive collection and analysis can be such a mechanism, dealing with test results, school projects, communication between different people (E.g., between teachers and mentors), class activity (through video) etc.

Modularity

Modularity is an important aspect of Maintainability. If the interaction between components (modules) is well understood, documented and defined so that there is minimum dependence between different components, a system can be said to be "modular." This would mean that when a certain component needs to be replaced, it can be done with minimal interference with the rest of the system. For example, if we want to reform the way teachers education is handled, it would be good if we can do that without making massive changes in the education of children. Or, taking a more specific example of a subsystem within a subsystem: Changing the way we select candidates for teachers is part of the teacher education subsystem. If the interfaces between the subsystems are well defined, we will be able to make changes to the teacher selection process without changing the whole teachers education much. With a beautifully modular education system, meaningful change would take years. In a non-modular system, a meaningful change becomes so difficult that it is normally never done. Modularity, while being very useful in creating a flexible system, stands in contradiction with another useful guideline:

System-wide cohesion

There are great advantages to a holistic approach to an education system. A lateral example would be using material being taught in history class to augment the understanding of literature, and vice versa. A "vertical" example may be the integration of teacher education into the schools when would-be teachers practice in real classes. Clearly we can get better results from mixing and leveraging one component of the education system with another. I don't have a clearly correct way to balance modularity and system-wide cohesion. For now, I can only say that both approaches need to be considered and contrasted in every relevant case where there is a specific contradiction between these directives.

Incremental Growth and Scalability

Once we know how we want the whole system to look like, we need to build it. We can't do it all at once. In the process of building the system, one component after the other, we need to keep the new components relevant to the existing system. For example, if we change the inner workings of Year 12 of K12 education, we still need the graduates to be able to enter University. We must have the Year 12 graduates acquire the same matriculation level the university currently requires. Also, when we design and implement a component in a single school or a few schools as an experiment, we need to have a scaling-up plan: How to move from 3 schools to 300. Clear interfaces between an existing education system and a new one are required for smooth transitions.

Parting thought

How many people are there in any state's education system, who see the system as a whole? How many people are there, whose role and competence is to evaluate the whole, its components and its relation to its environment?