The education sector has evolved by adopting technology in the form of Smart Boards, Online Classrooms, School Websites & Mobile apps, Online Assessments, Learning Management Systems, and much more. The focus behind such advancements is to give high-quality education and focused attention on the students’ progress.
However, when we look at the current workload of the teachers and administrators, we can see that many repetitive, manual, and tedious tasks occupy a significant part of their working schedule.
For teachers, it includes attendance management, grading homework, quizzes, tests, and projects, and report card generation.
Administrators, responsible for ensuring the smooth functioning of the educational institutes, carry out burdensome, monotonous, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks. These include but are not limited to scheduling academic meetings, managing student recruitment & enrollment, planning educational events, and processing invoices.
Such time-consuming tasks have resulted in teachers having less or no free time to focus on students’ growth as well as planning and implementing new teaching strategies. While administrators are unable to focus on setting educational aims, designing policies and procedures, and making crucial decisions that impact the academic community.
Robotic Process Automation(RPA) has already proven its mettle by automating end-to-end rule-based as well as complex processes across industries such as banking & finance, supply chain, healthcare, etc. It’s high time that the education industry also embraces automation via RPA bots or software so that their educators and administrators get more time to focus on significant value-adding activities.
Why is RPA the apt choice to automate the Education Industry?
Robotic Process Automation enables automation of tasks using software robots capable of using Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and much more. They perform tasks just like a full-time-employee, or at times, work simultaneously with humans to complete different types of assignments.
Let’s try to understand how RPA bots can transform the education industry:
- Course registration assistance
RPA chatbots can answer many simple questions that administrators receive at the time of registration. However, when they face complex inquiries, the chatbots can direct such queries to the administrators. This kind of automation can help administrators to focus only on the complex issues and serve the parents, students, and other concerned people better. - Shortlisting students and enrolment process
Administrators are responsible for reviewing all the applications, shortlisting eligible students, notifying about their selection, collecting relevant documents, and validating them to complete the enrolment process. RPA software can automate this process so that administrators get more time to focus on the students. - Attendance Management
While teachers are in-charge of keeping track of students’ attendance, administrators are responsible for maintaining the time-lines of staff in the educational institute. RPA can automate these time-consuming yet crucial tasks, send automated notifications to parents and other concerned people, as well as prepare reports for use in salary processing of the staff. - IT Operations
RPA can automate a lot of time-consuming activities such as reboot systems, monitor alerts, password reset, restart provider, unlock accounts, etc. and reduce the workload of the administrative staff. - Quick Planning and Communication
Educational institutes engage in a large number of activities, including planning for events, programs, meetings, training, as well as equipment reservations, creating class schedules, timetable updates, etc. Such tasks require scheduling after verifying the availability of all the concerned people and sending out notifications. RPA can automate such tasks quickly and cost-effectively. - HR and Finance Management
Activities like payroll processing, tracking payments, vendor management, maintaining records, managing the inventory, accounts receivables-payables, etc. are rule-based, and RPA can easily automate them to increase workflow efficiency. - Grading and Progress Reports
Educational institutes can program RPA software to grade homework assignments, quizzes, and some portions of tests. The RPA tool can also extract electronically saved scores and other details from the database to automate progress report creation, and also send the reports to parents.
Benefits of RPA for:
- Educational institutions
With RPA, Schools, Colleges, and Universities will better manage operations, compliance, and audits, reduce costs and improve the output metrics of applied functions, and earn higher customer satisfaction. They will have more time to focus on enhancing their educational capabilities. - Administrators
On implementation of RPA software, administrators will be free from paperwork, get enough technological support to carry out their tasks, and find time to perform more creative and inventive tasks. They will develop more meaningful relationships with teachers, students, and parents, thus improving the overall image of the institution. - Teachers
Teachers will use RPA to do cumbersome tasks like scheduling, attendance management, and grading. With the automation of routine tasks, they will focus more on their role responsibilities, which are enhancing their students’ performance. - Students
With the ease in the workloads of teachers and administrators, students will benefit from their increased attention and efforts to enhance the students’ learning. They will get quick feedback on their homework assignments, tests, etc. as well as error-free grading. With increased human interactions, students will gain new insights and knowledge. - Parents
With the automation of several manual activities, parents will receive accurate and timely notifications about their child’s attendance, grading, etc. Parents will also save time and costs to visit the educational institute with quick registration and enrollment processes. They will get prompt support from the administrative staff for their complex issues as they now focus on improving customer satisfaction post the automation of their cumbersome tasks. - Academic community
Post automation of time-consuming and tedious tasks, educators and administrators will focus on enhancing the educational sector with better teaching techniques, learning material, experiential learning, skill enhancement methods, etc. Such efforts will benefit not just the academic community but also the nation and the world alike.
Summing-up
Education plays an essential role in society by shaping the global citizens of tomorrow. Not only does the education industry have the pressing need and scope for automation but also a responsibility to keep up with the pace of this digitally-driven and ever-changing world.
Robotic Process Automation is quite simple to implement as it requires zero or minimal coding. Institutions can use the drag and drop options in the RPA tool to automate workflows and remotely monitor, schedule, control, and execute RPA deployments.
To learn more about automating the processes in your educational institution with RPA solutions, get in touch with our expert advisors.