Memorandum
Education is a growing industry that is becoming more open to the private sector. The concept of life-long learning becomes a necessity to secure and maintain a stable income. At the same time, many parents realize the importance of pre-school education as a pre-requisite for academic success in school. This memorandum will cover matters concerning a pre-school startup. My sister has a passion for teaching, and this memo can be used to provide her with a platform to educate young children.
The research strategy for a pre-school organization must cover the following aspects:
- State of the industry
- Funding and budgeting
- Organization of the teaching process
- Organization management
- Information management
Information about the general state of the education industry can be found in the World Yearbook of Education by Verger, Lubienski, and Steiner-Khamsi (2017), who states that the current difficulties suffered by the public sector in addition to a lack of pre-school facilities in Canada and the US make it a potentially profitable venture, supplying the existing demand.
There are several ways of establishing a preschool education organization and provide the necessary funding. A for-profit model would require the parents to pay for their children’s education, making it less accessible to economically disadvantaged families. Another way of providing funding for a preschool organization is to make it a non-profit and apply for government grants. According to Hikind (2018), there are over 13,630 current grants, over 3000 of which are dedicated to schools and preschools.
Science and technology lie at the core of a modern teaching process. A child should be made familiar with technology from an early age. The report by Nachiappan et al. (2018) stresses out the interconnection between information technology and teaching using interactive teaching aids. According to the guidebook, it is equally important to provide instructional material to educators to enable autonomy when creating and using teaching aids.
A private or home-run educational facility is very different from a conventional government-funded school. Beare, Caldwell, and Millikan (2018) propose numerous ways of organization management drawing on ideas outside of education. Some of the innovative processes that can be included in organizational management include flexitime, the vertical curriculum, mastery learning, and various implementations of information technology in education and management.
Information management plays an important part in the modern schooling process. Even in preschools, teachers and managers would be required to manage electronic curriculums, day-to-day management programs, and grade journals. Information technology will be used for budgeting, communication, and resource management (Bauer & Wise, 2016).
Therefore, information technology will be involved in almost every step of the organizational process. Some of the challenges related to it include the use of search engines, the operation of electronic curriculums, learning aids, and journals, and the use of management software to handle resources, money, and communication with various business outlets. These operations require IT skills, software purchases, and training for all parties involved in the process.
Therefore, as a business information systems consultant, I propose the following recommendations for a preschool educational organization (Kitsios & Kamariotou, 2016):
- Establish an IT role in the scope of the existing organizational structure, which will be responsible for researching, operating, and maintaining the existing specter of information solutions used in the management and educational process.
- Establish a budget necessary for purchasing and updating educational and management software.
- Provide the preschool with a necessary array of hardware for teachers, managers, and students to use.
- Conduct educational classes to facilitate understanding and use of the new technologies by all affiliated parties.
These measures would enable the effective use of IT in the scope of a preschool educational facility.
References
Bauer, S. W., & Wise, J. (2016). The well-trained mind: A guide to classical education at home. (4th ed.). New York, NY: Norton & Norton.
Beare, H., Caldwell, B. J., & Millikan, R. H. (2018). Creating an excellent school: Some new management techniques. London, UK: Routledge.
Hikind, L. (2018). Your #1 grant site. Web.
Kitsios, F., & Kamariotou, M. (2016). The impact of information technology and the alignment between business and service innovation strategy on service innovation performance. 2016 International Conference on Industrial Engineering, Management Science and Application (ICIMSA), 1-5.
Nachiappan, S., Osman, Z., Hassan, N. M., Jamil, N., Hussein, H., Othman, M., & Suffian, S. (2018). An analysis of the criteria and effectiveness of using teaching aids in preschool science and technology components in Malaysia. International Journal of Academic Research in Progressive Education & Development, 7(1), 63-82.
Verger, A., Lubienski, C., & Steiner-Khamsi, G. (Eds.). (2017). World yearbook of education 2016: The global education industry. New York, NY: Routledge.