Use Cases and Benefits of RPA in Education

With its automation capability, RPA tools will boost the accuracy and efficiency of the otherwise mundane administrative work.

Indeed, RPA for education can be a catalyst for innovation in the sector.

Automation. This word has recently gained a lot of attention from various sectors across the globe. While several industries are witnessing economic growth due to automation, the education sector seems to be least interested in embracing this accelerating, incredible trend. We still see teachers following the same old-fashioned approach that involes using a pen and paper for attendance management, grading, or progress report card generation. For tracking student progress, teachers have to conduct meetings with parents regularly. Apart from that, teachers have to invest a lot of their time and effort to plan and prepare strategies to make the learning environment optimal. Performing all of these correctly, while ensuring career success for students, can be a challenging endeavor for teachers. Not only teachers but also administrators are loaded with several responsibilities and duties that are cumbersome, repetitive, and time-consuming. School administrators are responsible for managing administrative support systems and the smooth running of the educational activities. Scheduling academic board meetings, managing student enrollment, planning educational events, processing invoices, taking care of student recruitment activities leaves administrators always busy at work. Besides, during seasonal peaks, they can be overburdened with various other roles too. So, what could be the right solution for this? Well, since the educational sector is flooded with tedious tasks, implementing automation tools like robotic process automation (RPA) for education can be ideal.

Probably, almost everyone has known the impact of RPA on businesses, in terms of efficiency, accuracy, and productivity gains. Now, it is quite time to know what RPA can do for the education sector.

Use Cases of RPA in Education

Before we list down the use cases of RPA in education, it is crucial to know what the automation tool exactly does. RPA is a software robot that is codified to perform a specific set of tasks without human involvement. As humans will be out of the picture, the work done will be accurate and error-free. Plus, the work will be completed at a faster pace than humans. As a result of this, users can be more effective, efficient, and productive in their endeavors. Let’s now understand how educational institutions can reap benefits from RPA.

1. Enrollment Process

The student enrollment process is one of the most time-intensive jobs that the educational institutions have to still carry out. The process involves several paper-intensive tasks that are not only cumbersome but also error-prone. Reading student application form, validating student documents, checking their eligibility for the applied course manually is tiresome, indeed! The need of the hour is to make these monotonous manual methods digital and streamlined. And RPA is one of the best ways educational institutions can achieve the goal. The RPA tool, trained in a fashion to interpret situations and make decisions by itself, can help eliminate the manual process hassles. The tool can simply check the form, analyze it, validate the documents, assess the eligibility criteria, and decide whether a student should be registered or not.

2. Meetup Schedules

Planning and preparing for committee board meetings, faculty meetings, and parent-teacher meetings are another tedious job that cannot be ignored. Meetings organizers have to check up on the attendee’s s schedule. Depending on their availability, the organizer has to then plan for a meeting. Once planned, the organizer has to draft emails separately to every attendee, passing on the message on the date, time, and location of the meeting. If there are any changes in the schedule of any one of the attendees, then the organizer has to repeat the entire procedure all over again.

RPA, on the other hand, can entirely automate the meeting scheduling process without human involvement. By checking every attendee’s work schedule, it can automatically draft emails to the concerned people, notifying them about the meeting. Besides, the tool can compose emails to parents with their kid’s progress reports and schedule a meeting, if the need is so.

3. Attendance Tracking

Attendance tracking is a repetitive yet crucial task that educational institutions have to perform on a daily basis. And if you think that the institutions have to only care about student’s attendance, then you are highly mistaken. Keeping accurate time reviews of faculties and school administration is important to offer fair compensation. It is important to keep track of the time that is being productively utilized by educational stakeholders, which isn’t possible by manual time registration.

By implementing the right attendance tracking system, the institutions can collect the information on the time logged in for work. The RPA tool will be trained well with relevant information on how to determine the right compensation for every employee in exchange for all the work they did for the institution.

4. Progress Reports

In addition to assessing student’s examination papers, educators are expected to prepare progress reports of every student. Indeed, that’s a lot of dull work to do. RPA can be a great help here. Once the scores are electronically stored, the RPA tool will extract the data from the database, enter the details in the progress card, and also send the reports to parents. Educators, on the other hand, will not be required to carry out this monotonous job, which means that they can then be able to take care of other productive work.

Benefits of RPA in Education

RPA, the latest automation trend, is indeed a catalyst for innovation and revolution in the education section. Let’s now list down the advantages that the education sector can grab from this opportunity.

• Reduced expenditure - The RPA tool can take up repetitive, high-volume tasks and execute the work at a faster pace and lower rate. This will help the educational institutions to improve their bottom line.
• Increased productivity - With RPA handling a majority of mundane tasks, employees who were assigned to perform those activities will get more leisure time. As a result of this, the employees can focus on to utilize their precious time for more productive and strategic work. The educational institutions can seamlessly handle massive amount of work and get it done without missing the deadlines. This indicates that, with RPA, the institutions can increase their productivity, which will help them maximize their returns.
• Improved work execution – One of the most incredible features of RPA is to be able to perform a particular, predetermined job round the clock without any mistakes. Work done with negligible errors will require no rework. Performance excellence can help the institutions to improve their overall work execution, helping them make more profits.

Truly, RPA is changing the meaning of how businesses carried out their operations until now. And now that we have seen the power and potential of RPA for education too. However, the adoption rate of RPA in the education sector is lesser compared to the other sectors. Probably, one of the reasons is lack of knowledge and expertise on how RPA operates. Educators and school administration should be provided the required training on the concepts of RPA and its working. Perhaps, this could be the first step to enhance the confidence of educational institutions to adopt this amazing technology and not miss out on this trend.