Is it possible to simplify processes within the education system?

If the management of the education system, both public and private, already turned out to be complex considering the large amount of information which is necessary to handle (students, marks, records, subjects, training programmes, teachers, etc.), the pandemic has furthered pressure to this context, thus displaying the need for greater efficiency and digitalisation of systems.

Not only teaching (lessons have become increasingly difficult), but also administrative management and the completion of the different processes necessary for students have been digitalised. From scholarship applications to enrolment, complaints, grade inquiry, etc. How to simplify all these procedures? Not only to improve the students’ experience, but also to reduce administrative costs.

Operational efficiency in the education sector

To improve operational efficiency, it is essential to update the communication channels between school administrations, teachers and students. In many cases, virtual campuses are one of the major platforms at which all of them converge and, for that reason, they need to be optimised them so that they can offer a useful experience. To do so, it would be interesting to introduce advanced search engines, capable of understanding natural language, but also of taking care of the content usability, design and distribution within the platform.

Process Mining also represents a useful tool in the context of education, since it allows us to understand what the processes are like and to monitor and improve them thanks to the combination of technology and consultancy. Hence, it would be possible to connect the systems in which the aforementioned wide variety of information is included, even between public and private entities, and to know how each process is carried out and in which points the users are encountering difficulties: a website which does not work, a complex procedure which is not brought to an end, etc.

Hypercustomisation for greater proactivity of administrative management

To enhance usability, it is important to highlight that not all users will be identical. For instance, a teacher will not need the same information or the same access than a student; not all the teachers will be focused on the same subjects, some of them will be assigned tutorials, others will be more or less techie or will use more or less virtual resources, etc. Therefore, it would be advisable to have a CDP (Customer Data Platform) solution that collects the users’ information and personalises their experience.

Other tools like document management or Machine Learning will also be very useful in the field of education but it is important to understand that technology for the sake of technology is not enough: all this needs to be defined within a strategy with a roadmap previously defined. Otherwise, technology could end up tangling processes all the more, and this is exactly what needs to be avoided. From VASS, we help many organisations in different sectors, including the education sector, set this type of initiatives in motion.