Representatives from schools throughout the Mesoamerica Region met 11-12 October at the Seminario Nazareno de las Américas campus in Costa Rica for a student information system training. 

The training focused on the GNECsis (pronounced Genesis) program and was led by Church of the Nazarene Software Developer Kindra Bible. 

GNECsis is a student information system that is provided through the work of the International Board of Education. 

“Global Missions, IBOE, IT, and our educational leaders from around the world have worked together to create a system to allow our schools to keep track of academic records, student accounts, human resources, and much more in a flexible way that works with the differing education requirements and technology challenges that exist in each country,” Bible said. “By using the same system, this allows our schools to collaborate together and learn from one another.”

The program is based on software initially developed by a third-party company and used by various colleges. Bible was a part of the team that took the open source code and modified it to be a web-based system. 

The flexible system can run on one computer or a server on a local network with or without internet access. The team also works with the Church of the Nazarene’s Global IT team to evaluate each school’s infrastructure in order to provide the best solution.

The institutions that were unable to send representatives to the training will still have access to the GNECsis system, and several schools on the region will deploy the system in 2019.

“We are grateful that the Mesoamerica Region is willing to collaborate with us and their sister institutions globally to meet our common needs,” Bible said. “I am excited about what this collaboration means for our Nazarene education worldwide.”

Nazarene schools on the Asia-Pacific and South America regions were the first to use the GNECsis system, and Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri, on the USA/Canada Region launched earlier this year. Southern Africa Nazarene University is currently working on collecting all of their student data to bring the system to Africa, and Nazarene Theological College–Manchester also plans to have the system up and running in 2019, making them the first school to bring GNECsis to the Eurasia Region.