Automation has impacted literally every aspect of our lives. However, not everyone accepts new technology in a positive way. There are fears that robots and specialized software will reduce the need for human resources and many people will be left unemployed. The education industry is no exception. Constantly dealing with a large amount of paperwork, it remains quite conservative for digital transformation. In order to see the positive effect, it’s necessary to understand the elements of educational processes, what they consist of, and in what way education automation tools can come in handy.

How automation in education works

The education industry used to be associated only with real-life interaction between teachers and students. However, taking a deeper look, we’ll see many complicated management processes, including student admissions, document processing, sending enrollment verification, billing and payment acceptance, handling requests for change of program or place of training online, student attendance tracking, monitoring academic success, etc., require tons of paperwork to be done daily.

Processing and tracking all the paperwork manually is time consuming and prone to error. With automation education solutions, administration staff is able to manage documents faster and with better accuracy. Let’s take a look at a little bit more details into the components of the educational process and how automation workflows help boost them:

1. Student admission. During the application process, schools and colleges receive thousands of student registration forms along with their academic success papers, references, and motivation letters. Many students also send international student financial aid application forms to get a scholarship or grant. Each application package should be properly reviewed by several people and stored in certain folders. A tool with robotic process automation technology helps significantly reduce time spent on processing each form.
2. Verification of enrollment. After all registration steps are passed, it’s time to communicate with the most successful students about their acceptance to the program. Instead of manually preparing and sending thousands of college enrollment verification letters, admissions staff can use RPA solutions to automate the process. Special bots can help educational institutions automatically generate acceptance letters and pre-fill them with student data.
3. Schedule-planning. To create and maintain schedules, teachers not only have to spend a lot of their time creating sheets but also a lot of time preparing and planning to create the sheets. With the help of workflow automation, timetables can be created quickly and all mundane steps automatically streamlined.
4. Assessing. During the learning process, there’s also much paperwork to do. Homework, tests, and quizzes used to be checked manually on a daily basis. There’s no need to do that anymore. You can automate it all. Teachers can collect student tests, check them, and send their feedback faster than ever.