Technology has played a critical role in education. Teachers can supplement instructional materials with videos and students can connect online for remote learning.
However, many institutions are still bogged down by manual processes. Examples include student enrollments, purchase acquisitions, absence requests, and more.
Continue reading “How to Get Started With Digital Transformation in Education”
With many approval stages — often including district board approval — badly managed purchase orders can take weeks or even months to process.
Teachers can become frustrated and take matters into their own hands to get the tools they need to provide learners with a successful learning environment.
Keep reading to find out how schools can benefit from automating their purchase order workflows to improve efficiency and transparency while gaining greater control over their spending.
Continue reading “How to Automate Your School Purchase Orders”
Despite incredible advancements in technology in recent years, most K-12 schools still use massive amounts of paper.
It’s estimated that the average school uses 2,000 pages per day, which quickly adds up to 360,000 pieces of paper over the course of 180 school days.
Between the classroom (handouts, worksheets, tests, homework, report cards, permission slips, etc.) and administration (application forms, student records, newsletters, HR and accounting, etc.), there’s a lot of paperwork to manage and track for administrators, teachers, and students–on top of an already-packed list of responsibilities.
Continue reading “The Paperless School: 9 Ways to Reduce Waste and Increase Efficiency”
Higher education institutes have an immense workload when it comes to ensuring that students – and staff – have access to all the resources they need for an outstanding education.
Yet, despite incredible advances in technology in recent years, much of academia still resort to manual workflows to get much of this administrative work done. This leads to piles of paperwork and disjointed processes in which it’s easy for errors to occur and documents to go missing or students to slip between the cracks – which can have dire consequences in the case of processes such as financial aid applications. Not only that, but talented staff end up wasting countless hours on menial tasks like data entry and emails, which is bad news for job satisfaction.
The solution: business process management. What exactly is BPM? In a nutshell, business process management refers to the practice of digitizing, proactively monitoring, and optimizing the sequence of tasks that need to be performed to achieve a particular business goal. Luckily for businesses – and higher education institutions – everywhere, business process automation software can make this much easier.
Continue reading “BPM in Higher Education: A Complete Guide”
Technology has evolved in leaps and bounds in recent years and no one can deny the incredible potential it has to impact education. With the promise of advances like e-learning and classes taught using virtual reality headsets, the possibilities for digital transformation in education seem endless.
Technology, it seemed, could make learning easier and address different learning methods, for instance by making learning more visual or collaborative.
Not only that, technology could significantly streamline the way teachers and education administrators communicate with parents about everything from reminding them of homework or tests to getting field trip permission slips signed.
We had a suspicion that the technology used by many schools is outdated, so we decided to find out how parents feel about the state of technology used in their children’s schools.
So we surveyed parents to find out how satisfied they are with the way their children’s schools use technology for communication.
Continue reading “Survey: How Effectively Are Schools Using Technology?”
Much has been written about the rise of online education.
Technology has unlocked an enormous opportunity for students of all ages, locales, and interests to gain access to knowledge on nearly any topic and from anywhere.
Even so, only about 30% of undergraduates enrolled in even a single online course in 2017.
Most education is still done on co-located campuses and in classroom settings. And most institutions, even those with progressive technology adoption, remain firmly rooted in in-person instruction.
This means that most schools and universities function primarily in the traditional sense. From a business perspective, the operations of most educational institutions are driven by processes that assume the day-to-day work of the administration will be handled in person and on campus.
In other words, many schools aren’t prepared or equipped for remote work.
This creates a problem.
Continue reading “The Business of Education Must Go On: How Schools & Universities Operate Remotely”
Higher education has made great strides in embracing digital transformation, yet, much time is still wasted due to administrative inefficiencies. Workflow automation offers the opportunity to eliminate inefficiencies and save time and money by automating tedious manual administrative processes.
Simply put, workflow automation is the process of automating the sequence or chain of events that need to take place in order for a process to be completed. For instance, automating the admissions workflow might streamline the process by electronically routing documents to the right people at the right time without manual email or phone calls. Additionally, the process of notifying students of changes to their application status – as well as other communications – might be automated.
Workflow automation in higher education not only reduces time-consuming busywork, freeing staff up for more important tasks – it also reduces the margin of human error, which has real world consequences for both students and administrators. Critical decisions like admissions and financial aid often hinge on these central processes.
Staff may struggle to juggle admin with the rest of their workload, resulting in students becoming frustrated by long waiting periods for simple requests that shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to process and provide feedback.
In fact, fifty-five percent of education managers spend an average of a full workday on “manual, repetitive tasks” per week, according to a 2018 report.
Moreover, when academic staff are preoccupied with administrative tasks, their research and teaching suffers. As such, workflow automation that reduces the administrative burden academics face can be an effective way to attract top talent.
Continue reading “The Guide to Workflow Automation for Higher Education”
Students today are more technologically savvy than ever before and school systems should be the same. Some schools still mainly keep records as paper documents in filing cabinets. Others have moved onto the stage of digitizing where physical forms are uploaded to computers and sent back and forth through emails.
The most advanced schools have started having simple tasks become fully automated. Fully automating tedious tasks is the stage you want your school to be in. This article illustrates the benefits of workflow automation for schools, which processes can be easily automated, and offers a step-by-step guide on how schools can use one platform, frevvo, to get started.
Continue reading “School Workflow Automation: The Ultimate Guide”
Schools must be very careful when they plan activities for students. Whether it’s a study tour, sports activity or even simply using the student’s personal information for a media event, it is of utmost importance that the school first gets the necessary consent forms signed from the parents to avoid any confusion later.
Continue reading “How Online Consent Forms Better Serve Students and Parents in Your K-12 School”How much paper does my school use? What does it cost? It’s not easy to answer that question but we’ll try.
According to the NYC Government, the paper discarded during the school year in one NYC school added up to 28 pounds for each student, teacher, and staff member. A standard sheet of laser-printer paper of the usual thickness, either US “letter” size or international “A4” size, weighs 4.5 grams. That means 100 sheets weighs almost exactly one pound. Put the above two together and you get about 2,800 sheets of paper per person every year in a single school.
For a district with 10,000 students, teachers & staff, that’s 28,000,000 sheets of paper. At Staples, a pallet (200,000 sheets) costs $1,400. So, our 10,000 student school district spends at least $200,000 every year on paper. And, that’s not even taking into account printers, toner & other supplies which could easily double or triple the cost.
Imagine if
that was all electronic. If a sheet of paper holds about 2K of information, all 2,800 sheets would fit into about 5.5MB. For our 10,000 student school district, all the information would fit on an inexpensive flash drive and you’d have some room to spare. And, you don’t even have to spend money – you can put it all in Google Drive with unlimited free storage for education.
And, it’s not just money you’ll save. You’ll help the environment too by saving 2,500 trees and 55,000 gallons of oil.
Of course, you can’t just stick millions of sheets of paper on a flash drive. The reality is far more complex but you can start chipping away today.
It’s easy to reduce paper usage in your school workflow software like frevvo. Interested in learning more? Contact frevvo today.
