Technology
campusreview.com.au
Path to success
Technology the key to streamlining
administration processes and
boosting student satisfaction.
By Jamie Atherton
I
n any organisation, whether large or
small, making efficiencies to standard
processes will have a direct benefit on
productivity and free up staff time to focus
on higher‑level activities.
Universities and higher education facilities
are no different, but they often have more
obstacles to overcome in order to achieve
those efficiencies.
Further to this, the success or failure of
a university is more tangible than in many
other industries, with key performance
indicators standing in plain view: student
retention rates, reduced time taken to
graduate, lower attrition rates as students
move from one course to another, and
finding a clear career pathway at the end
of a degree. With those metrics in mind,
improving the student experience becomes
mission critical.
Studies by the Australian government
have examined the factors behind student
attrition and found much of it to be
“unpredictable or inevitable”.
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However, the attrition rate for first-
year students is much higher than in
subsequent years, sitting at around
25 per cent, and attrition rates were fairly
stable overall at 15 per cent.
Government reviews taken over the
course of many years have consistently
reported drivers of attrition to be:
• The learning environment — not just
the change in learning culture from
school to higher education but more
importantly the mode of learning (off-
site, online, part-time)
• The teaching ability of lecturers — many
lecturers are not adequately trained in
teaching
• The lack of student engagement —
student-student and student-teacher
interaction
• High student-to-staff ratios — and the
availability of lecturers and tutors to
students
• The lack of student support –
information and services
• Personal factors — such as financial,
social, emotional, health or other
life events. *
Technology can help on nearly all levels
of campus life, and one key strategy
universities can explore is a content services
approach to their information platforms.
While technology and information sharing
has traditionally been the act of digitising
and managing documentation, the role
of a content services solution has evolved
in recent years, and now encompasses
content management and storage,
digitisation, workflows, automation and
data analysis.
Moving files into digital form makes them
searchable, easily managed and, most of
all, provides staff with a holistic, 360-degree
view of a topic or process. This enables
significant streamlining of areas that are
typically labour-intensive, such as enrolling
new students and administering their
academic life on campus.
For example, St Leonard’s College in
Victoria reduced the time taken to process
each waitlist application from 20 minutes to
1.5 minutes, so a half day of work can now
be done in 10 minutes.
A content services solution will have an
enterprise content management (ECM)
platform at its core, which enables better
visibility of all file formats whether they
happen to be structured or unstructured
data – images from a mobile device,
payment records from a banking app, or
any other form of documentation. The
workflow of managing enrolment or
other processes can be organised into any
manner of virtual structures and shared
across a team, department, faculty, or entire
campus workforce. Access controls can be
set to protect sensitive information, allowing
only those with clearance to access certain
files or storage areas.
Automation is rapidly becoming a key
part of content services, reducing human
intervention and the risk of errors, especially
in repetitive manual, data-entry tasks. Like
many facets of a content services solution,
this leaves staff with more time to focus on
higher-level tasks, including more face time
with students and faculty, which helps
address the issue cited by the government
report of a lack of student engagement.
Further improving the student
experience, fewer physical documents and
faster access to files and student records
results in streamlined processes, and
therefore less time spent waiting in queues.
For a student wanting to change aspects
of a course, for example, one quick search
can bring up their entire student history,
including academic records, payments,
course credits, student union membership,
borrowing history from the library, and
everything related to their student journey.
This empowers fast, accurate decision-
making from the admin side, and makes
life easier for students. Having their entire
student record ready and visible at all
touchpoints across campus reduces waiting
time, and eases frustration at having to
explain a situation several times and sign
into digital devices across departments.
Improving the student experience
overall – increasing student engagement
and learning environment, better student