9 RPA Use Cases That Can Take Your Educational Institution To The Next Level

Date: June 23, 2021

Be it holding parent-teacher meetings or creating a conducive learning environment, administrative processes at schools, colleges, and universities are unnecessarily paper-heavy. These processes take away both time and resources that could have been used to ensure student success. In fact, most of the Australian universities have only one staff for 20+ students. This ratio gets even worse with repetitive tasks and different roles during the peak season. RPA in education can really help educators and administrators automate tasks and processes which will otherwise become cumbersome for them.

Helping educational institutes to seamlessly handle high-volume tasks, robotic process automation tools can bring in the much-desired efficiency in the administrative process. In this article, you’ll get to know more about RPA use cases in the education industry, benefits of using robotic process automation in education, and how it can help you manage sophisticated administrative operations.

What Does RPA Stand For In Education?

Robotic Process Automation, as the definition suggests, makes it a cakewalk for you to execute tedious, heavy paper-work, or repetitive tasks. It does so with more efficiency and zero error rate. So, what kind of tasks can you automate at your educational institution? Be it the administrative tasks, academic ones, or finance & HR tasks, you can easily automate them all with robotic process automation. At least 60% of these tasks can be efficiently done by RPA tools and that way educators will have more time to do what they do best i.e. teaching.

9 RPA Use Cases in Education Industry

When it comes to the education industry, most of the tasks come from two broad areas i.e. administrative and academics. In this section, you will learn more about how you can save time for employees from both of these departments and what kind of tasks can be actually automated.

1) Biometric Attendance

The Biometric punch in and punch out is a must-have for the administrative departments across educational institutions irrespective of their size. It helps you to record the time of clocking in as well as clocking out. Not only this helps in maintaining a record of all members but also offers reports for overtime benefit calculation and so on.

2) Teacher Substitution

You can easily allot faculty to the classes they need to teach or cover in absence of a teacher as per their availability by mapping class timings, sections and teacher details etc. Needless to say, this boosts staff productivity. With the help of mobile-friendly applications, they can easily access their schedules anytime they deem necessary and manage their timelines accordingly.

3) Enrolment Process

Student enrolment is one of the most hectic and time-intensive jobs that an educational institution has to carry out. This not only involves tons of paperwork but simultaneously requires effective management of the same. One missing document can create a mess, leading to stress and hence low productivity. RPA can easily replace this manual hassle process. From checking the form at the initial stage to analysing it, validating the documents, assessing the eligibility criteria etc and deciding whether a student should be registered or not, RPA tools in education can make the entire process seamless for you.

4) Scheduling Meetings

Be it the committee meeting or parent-teacher meeting, scheduling meetings and sending out notifications can be a tedious task. What can be even more time-consuming is scheduling and sending revised invites, in case of the meeting being cancelled. Robotic process automation tools can easily automate scheduling meetings and send invites to each and every attendee. You can also use RPA bots to send reminders along with any necessary attachment.

5) Creating Fee Structures

With the help of RPA, an institution can create multiple fee groups without any hustle, craft scholarship applications or decide upon any optional fee (tuition fee, university fee etc.) with their respective activities.

Isn’t this amazing - the number of tasks you can do with RPA with so much ease and have plenty of time left to look after high-value work.

Apart from the above 5 use cases, hiring of faculty, alerts/notification on new hires/exits, monitoring student/teacher performances etc., are some more use cases that one can look into while learning about RPA in Education. You can also use RPA for automating accounting processes, fast-forwarding even the execution of interviews. Then, the on-boarding process of students, cross-checking papers, inquiry etc.

Here are a few more academic RPA use cases that you can implement at your educational institute.

6) Classroom and Online Learning

The online learning environment today comes with a number of tasks that teachers need to take care of. Some of these tasks include attendance management, checking and grading assignments, tracking course progress, etc. Robotic process automation has the power and effectiveness of handling both offline classroom and online learning processes.

A term called RFID chip (Radio-frequency identification) can be provided to each and every student in the form of identity cards to auto-mark the attendance when they enter the premises. Similarly, attendance sheets with timestamps for self-reporting can be provided for online classes.

RPA can manage content on every platform that exists as of today and provide supporting material to the students for assignments as and when required.

7) Assessment Tasks

Whether you need to plan examinations or create an exam hall seating arrangement, along with session monitoring with video surveillance or creating result cards for every student, RPA bots and software solutions can easily carry out each of these activities, making the assessment much easier than you would have imagined.

8) Answering Queries

Answering student queries usually involves a student advisor. With AI-enhanced bots, you can easily answer each and every query related to pre and post enrolment phases of the student life cycle including but not restricted to course, fees, etc. You can also offer student counselling, monitor their activities, and help them optimise their study-schedule.

9) Co-Curricular Activities

RPA Software bots are also moving forward in co-curricular activities. It has the capacity and intelligence to analyse matches and help in team/player selection for the institution.

With Covid – 19 pandemic having its wing spread across the planet, more and more education institutions are adopting robotic process automation to achieve desired outcomes every day. A close look at RPA use cases in schools will tell you how effectively they are handling parent-teacher meetings, marking attendance of staff and students, making sure that use of paper is eliminated to the highest extent. This not only saves time and resources, as already mentioned, but it then subconsciously enforces teachers to focus on students’ overall development as they become free of heavy paperwork.

If you take a glance at Robotic process automation in higher education, you will realise that RPA is the best technology solution for cost savings, efficiency gains, and improved service delivery. Many higher educational institutions are automating tasks like:

  • Employee Onboarding and Off-boarding (Using a bot to grant/cancel ID badges and maintain/revoke system access)
  • Achievement Monitoring (Using bot for the tedious task of deterring potential student captains, etc.)
  • Progress Towards Graduation (Using a bot to analyse student progression towards graduation)

RPA In University - Case study: Automation Anywhere and University of Melbourne

Who would have thought that universities can save thousands of hours with RPA tools in place? Well, here is a case study on how the University of Melbourne saves 10,000 hours annually with RPA solutions from Automation Anywhere. The university automated 22 processes which helped to save 10,000 hours of manual labor annually. RPA bots helped the university administration to automate data approval during the admission and an array of administrative tasks as well.

According to Shiv Chandra, Robotic Process Automation Manager, University of Melbourne, ‘By bringing in bots to take on the human-intensive and repetitive work, we have been able to create efficiencies and empower existing staff members to repurpose their roles-actually getting people to do what they’re most passionate about and qualified to do.’

4 Benefits of RPA In The Education Sector

Benefits of deploying RPA at your educational institute extend beyond your imagination. Here are some of the key benefits to consider as you start using robotic process automation.

1) Reduced Costs: RPA tools can do various tasks at a faster pace meaning it helps you save money that you would have otherwise spent on getting those tasks done by human beings.

2) Enhanced Productivity: Employees can secure more leisure and relaxation as RPA will handle and effectively perform most of the annoying and mundane tasks.

3) Faster Execution: One of the most exciting features of RPA is that it can carry out jobs round the clock without any errors. Organisations can achieve performance excellence because of an overall improvement in job execution.

4) Increased Long-term Savings: It is evident from all the systematic operational effectiveness of RPA in the education sector that cost savings are a mere by-product of what it brings on the table. With cost-effective tools, organisations experience long – term savings that they otherwise would not have.

Apart from the above benefits, RPA also increases compliance and streamlines disparate sources since these tools are governed by strict rules and there exists no room for ambiguity.

The future that can be seen moving forward is that of expansion in an automated workforce. RPA is redefining business processes in all sectors and industries. The adoption rate in the education sector is still way behind than any other sector in the talk, but as expertise and knowledge of how RPA functions will spread and opportunities will outweigh reluctance, a shift will happen, giving birth to a new era.

If you are an educational institution and want to enjoy the benefits of robotic process automation, give us a call at 0424 357 817!


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Gaurav Sarin

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Gaurav is the Director and Principal Consultant at NeeVista. He helps enterprises leverage the power of data, digital technology, and automation.