The company is partnering with the higher education institution to offer its suite overseas from 2017. The University of Chile is the only institution in the country to appear on the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU, known as the Shanghai Rankings), and is placed on the fourth place in Latin America.
The partnership to use U-Planner's software for school management is part of a project that combines mathematical modeling, localization, economic analysis and geographical information, according to Diario Financiero.
The Chilean business newspaper said that the goal of this project is to determine where to locate public primary and secondary school in Chile, for an optimal resource planning.
Jorge Amaya, a researcher for the Center for Mathematical Modeling at the University of Chile, told Diario Financiero that with a broader scientific base “you could identify where do you need more schools, what type of institutions o you need, how many children, how many hours per subject, etc.
“The (Chilean) educational reform will bring about new challenges regarding planning,” Mr. Amaya projected.
“With the end of for-profit education, many voucher-based private schools will disappear, and we must create public policies to replace them, as most of those children are low-income and cannot afford private schools.”
The program has run a pilot in the Santiago Metropolitan Region, with 20 public schools and signed a partnership with the Chilean Ministry of Education to run a trial period in other boroughs of the Greater Santiago.
Diario Financiero underlined some of the applications of big data for strategic planning offered by companies such as U-Planner. These uses help evaluate how much it would cost to place a new school and, in cases, whether it is convenient to merge schools, close them or run other activities, with applications like Google Maps, to visualize the territory and look at the number of existing schools.
By 2017, they look forward to expanding the tools for the Chilean educational reform and expand to other Chilean cities such as Concepción, Valparaíso, and Coquimbo.