Professor Sami Shaban has a Bachelors in Computer Science from North Carolina State University, a Masters in Biomedical Systems Science and a PhD in Health Informatics from the Department of Biometry, Epidemiology, and Bioinformatics, Medical University of South Carolina. He also has the ESME Certificate in Medical Education. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Medical Education Department, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, United Arab Emirates University. His main research interests are in evaluating and developing systems for healthcare and medical education. He has developed several systems including a Trauma Registry, Medical Curriculum Management System, Assessment Management System, Internal Medicine Residency Rotation Scheduling System, and software for measuring and analyzing oxygen consumption in vitro.

In the last few decades, many education systems have been developed to help manage the educational process and deliver teaching and learning using IT methods which help with better retention of the learning material. There are several broad areas for education systems such as Curriculum, Assessment, Grades, Evaluations, and Teaching & Learning Enhancing Systems. So far, private companies have developed these systems in isolation and most use proprietary or locked databases which don't allow access by other systems. The need for integration, data exchange and inter-operability is growing as duplication of data causes several problems such as manual data entry into multiple system which is error prone and slow and manual importing & exporting of data from one system to another. These can result in mismatching of data and outdated data in some of the system among other problems.

I present the current status of education informatics in educational institutions which have gone the route of in-house developed education systems, my institution being one of these. This has happened mainly due to the lack of integration between existing education systems available in the market. It is also due to missing needed features and lack of the ability to customize the systems in some cases. I also present an example success story in integration of systems in the Health Informatics field which, several decades ago, set standards for storage, coding and transfer of data which forced software developers to develop systems using these standards and allowed for inter-operability between these systems. There is a similar need for such standards in the education informatics field to allow for similar data exchange and inter-operability between education systems in the market.