In the salad days of the millennium, it is an irrefutable fact that Automation provides considerable cost and time savings, smoother processes, increased productivity and efficiency, improved customer experience, and ultimately an increase in business value to any firm. Software robots can perform manual, repetitive, and rule-based jobs more quickly and effectively than human employees, allowing them to focus on higher-value activities for the firm.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a proven technology of software robots programmed to perform daily duties with improved accuracy. Specifically, exploring the education sector where RPA can be a real game-changer because it is a key growth factor. RPA can minimize the workload of university officials and allow them to universally offer students services such as counseling, advising, course registration, and more in a timely and equal manner in education, where the staff to student ratio is often inappropriate. Following are a few areas in the education sector where digital transformation through RPA implementation can lead to tangible benefits.
Registration
Nowadays registration process is time-consuming and laborious as it involves sending a reminder to students via email/SMS, then checking their financial and academic situation after the prerequisite required for the courses is also checked. This all can be done by having RPA bots that are programmed to do all the mentioned tasks for registration. Universities in which student-staff ratio is quite inappropriate can leverage this technology and save time and resources.
Enrollment & Shortlisting Candidates
The enrollment process involves a lot of paperwork, is very complex for the staff o handle the enrollment of thousands of students. RPA bots can be programmed to monitor each student’s file at regular intervals and send them a reminder if a box on the checklist has not yet been checked. They can also be arranged to inform students about registration cycle deadlines and timetables. This reduces the chances of a student missing enrolment due to a simple date or deadline being overlooked.
Attendance Management
The control of attendance is a crucial and time-consuming aspect of classroom management. Automation is a simple but precise way of streamlining the process. Because the data is digitized, the teacher can quickly put attendance data into a spreadsheet to acquire meaningful insights, such as how pupils are attending class this year compared to last year. This knowledge could aid him in making curriculum revisions to make lessons more engaging. It could also be utilized in university officials’ performance evaluations.
Assets Reservation
Again, we’re dealing with scarcity: many students compete for a limited number of resources, such as library books, specialist computers, textbooks, and so on. The process becomes more equitable and efficient with accurate scheduling and allocation. Each piece of equipment can be assigned a number in the system and reserved digitally when reserving it.
Fee Structuring
Affirmative pricing strategies are common in schools and universities, where students from various social, economic, academic, civil, and athletic backgrounds pay varying tuition funds. RPA bots can be programmed to apply pre-determined tuition discounts to students who match particular criteria and to enter the data into their financial site.
Personalizing the learning experience
RPA-enabled software programs can be utilized in online learning to develop individualized teaching routes for each student based on exam scores, interests, hobbies, attendance data, and more. Students may, for example, contact an RPA-chatbot for assistance with a certain topic, and the chatbot would acquire all relevant information on demand by scraping the school’s library database or teachers’ notes.
Assessment
For grading online tests, RPA bots can be designed in a rule-based framework. For MCQs, the bot would use a binary code that reads, “Mark false if anything other than [the correct answer].” For open-ended questions, the bot can be designed to search the answer for clues to the answer key using natural language processing (NLP).
Financial Reporting and Payroll Management
Schools and colleges, like any other institution, must give their financial reports to their stakeholders at the end of each fiscal year. Financial reporting software can be used to generate new financial reports automatically after each term, considering variables such as tuition receivables, donations, wage bills, and so on.
Payroll software that incorporates RPAs can be utilized to keep track of all employees’ payment processing. Employees at universities are frequently divided into wage categories. Using automated software to submit and process payroll promptly is beneficial.
Counselling
Healthcare chatbots are getting increasingly popular. And, unfortunately, there are increasing concerns about students’ mental health on college campuses. Universities can use RPA-enabled emotional chatbots to listen to students, refer them to a live agent if a specific keyword is spoken (for example, “suicide,” “harming myself,” etc. ), plan counseling appointments, and more.