RPA uses software robots to automate time-consuming, repetitive tasks, freeing employees from manual, mundane tasks and allowing them to focus on more strategic activities. Their benefit to us is a lower workload, and higher process execution accuracy. These benefits make RPA particularly suitable to educational institutions.
The reason why RPA in education is beneficial is because at educational institutions, the staff to student ratio is often disproportionate, so RPA can step in to reduce the staff members workload. This will, in return, enable schools and universities to improve their services, such as counseling, advising, course registration, and more.
Admissions
Shortlisting candidates
Once the registration cycle closes, the first shortlist of candidates should be drawn up. RPA robots can create this preliminary list quickly and efficiently by cross-checking each student’s application info against the enrollment criteria. For example, if a TOEFL score is a must in the application, but the student hasn’t submitted theirs, then they would be eliminated in a rule-based flow.
Using intelligent automation in the shortlisting stage also makes the process equitable by not allowing underperforming applications to go to the next round.
Attendance management
Some professors assign a portion of a student’s grade based on their attendance. For online courses in particular, bots can be programmed to pick the student’s name from the attendance list each session. They could then place a check mark next to their name for class attendance that day.
Attendance management is a crucial yet time-consuming aspect of classroom management. RPA for schools streamlines this process, allowing teachers to quickly digitize and transfer attendance data into spreadsheets for actionable insights, such as attendance trends compared to previous years.
This information could help him or her make changes to the curriculum to make lessons more engaging. Or it could be used in performance evaluations by university administrators.
Payroll management
Payroll software using RPAs can streamline timely payment processing for diverse university employee groups, such as teaching and research assistants, lecturers, and professors. Automated systems enable efficient payroll submission and processing, ensuring new employee data is quickly integrated.
Explore payroll automation in more details.
Test and assignment grading
Especially for large electives with a large number of students, assessment of exams can take a lot of time and energy. RPA bots can be programmed in a rule-based framework for grading online assessments.
For multiple-choice questions, the bot would follow a binary code that reads, “If anything other than [the correct answer], mark false.” For open-ended questions, the bot can be programmed to use NLP to search the answer for clues to the answer key. For example, it can be instructed to mark an answer as “correct” if it contains an important keyword from the answer key or something similar.
Answering queries
Students always have questions about something. And the maze of bureaucracy in educational institutions makes it time-consuming for a student to call and then be transferred to several people and departments before reaching the right end of the line.
RPA chatbots or RPA software bots can be programmed to receive questions, use NLP and NLU to understand the context and meaning of the questions, use answers from a command catalog, and then quickly give the student the most appropriate answer.
Student Experience
Course registration
RPA bots, in regular intervals, can send a mobile notification/email reminder to students so they don’t miss their registration deadline. Once the student registers for a course, RPA can process the requests automatically, by checking if they meet the eligibility criteria for the course. For example, if a student hasn’t taken a prerequisite course, the software bots can suggest that they do so first.
Managing waitlists
RPA tools can be used to manage waitlists automatically. If a student wants to register for a course that is already full, the software can add him/her to the waitlist and enroll them once a spot is available.
Sending reminders for missing documents
RPA in higher education is useful because it streamlines application processing. The application process of colleges/universities is paper-heavy and exhaustive. Students often have to submit:
- Multiple recommendation letters
- Transcripts
- Standardized test scores
- Immigration forms (for international students)
- Letters of intent
- Financial documents, etc.
And for staff members who receive hundreds of enrollment applications yearly, it might be inevitable that a student’s missing documents/exam scores go unnoticed after the deadline. For instance, a student might mistakenly register for the SAT after application deadline.
RPA tools can check each student’s application checklist to send a reminder to each student about their missing documents/exam scores. Moreover, if applicable, bots can exchange data with test centers via APIs and suggest exam dates that match the registration timeline.
Personalizing the learning experience
In online learning, RPA can create personalized teaching paths for each student, by leveraging their exam scores, likes, hobbies, attendance information, and more. The students themselves could ask an RPA-chatbot, for instance, for help in a certain topic, and the chatbot would gather all the useful information, by scraping the school’s library database or the teachers’ notes, on command.
Case study:
In the Georgia Institute of Technology, they used a chatbot as a TA for a graduate course. The chatbot, “Ms. Watson,” developed by IBM Watson, was able to 10,000 messages a semester with a 97% success rate. It took students some time to realize the Ms. Watson they were speaking to wasn’t a real TA, but rather a chatbot.
Scheduling meetings
An automated scheduling tool can enhance efficiency in education by helping students schedule appointments with administrative staff. The bot can allocate specific time frames based on the visit’s purpose (e.g., reason “X” gets 30 minutes; reason “Y” gets 1 hour unless specified).
Time conflicts are also automatically defused. If there are ad hoc adjustments to be made, they can be made on the spot. Or if decisions need to be made (e.g., two students want to see an advisor at the same time for the same reason), the problem can be sent to the advisor to decide.
In addition, meeting invitations are sent to the correct requester with all the correct data, such as the reason for the visit, meeting leader, duration, date, location, and so on. Automating the scheduling process reduces the likelihood of time overlaps, overload, and errors.
Equipment reservation
We are again talking about scarcity here: disproportionate numbers of students wanting to get access to a resource, such as a library book, a specialized computer, textbooks, and more.
Accurate scheduling and allocation makes the process fairer and more efficient. When reserving equipment, each piece of equipment can be assigned a number in the system so that it can be reserved digitally. For example, if a student wants access to a microscope that has already been reserved, they will be denied the request, not granted it in error.
Counseling
Healthcare chatbots are becoming more popular these days. And there is, unfortunately, growing concerns over students’ mental health in college campuses. Universities can leverage RPA-enabled emotional chatbots that can listen to students, direct them to a live agent if a certain keyword is mentioned (i.e. “suicide,” “harming myself,” etc.), schedule them counseling appointments, and more.
Student feedback and survey processing
Robotic process automation (RPA) can be used to automate the process of collecting, processing, and analyzing student feedback and surveys. By automating this process, schools and universities can save time and resources, reduce errors, and gain insights into student experiences. The bot can:
- Collect survey data
- Sort/filter data
- Analyze the inputs
- Generate reports
- Send submission confirmation emails to students
Backoffice
Automated financial reporting
Like any other organization, schools and universities have to present their financial reports to their stakeholders at the end of each fiscal year. Financial reporting software can be used to automatically generate new financial reports at the end of each term, by taking into account pertaining variables, such as the tuition receivables, donations, wage bills, etc.
We have an article that talks about RPA in reporting in more detail.
Processing transcripts
Robotic process automation bots can gather and input the grades of a student, their instructors’ comments about their progress, and include all supplementary information onto their transcripts.
This is especially helpful for high school seniors applying to universities and needing their high school reports on time to upload them on their college applications before deadlines.
Personalizing tuition fee structures
Schools and universities often engage in affirmative pricing models. The students that come from different social, economical, academical, civil, and athletic backgrounds pay different tuition funds from each other.
RPA bots automatically apply a pre-determined tuition discounts to students who fall in different tuition brackets.
What are the rpa education real-life examples to eliminate mundane tasks?
Staff at the Department for Education (DfE) and the Education Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) are using bots to automate tasks like email processing and funding claims, greatly improving efficiency.
Their bot “Arnold” processes 60,000 emails monthly, cutting handling time from 2.5 days to 4 minutes. “Barney” automates EU Social Fund claims, reducing processing time by 95% and allowing staff to focus on higher-value tasks. By 2025, DfE plans to have over 1,000 digital workers enhancing processes and saving time.1
Further reading
If you are interested in learning more about the use of digital technologies in education, read:
- 12 Digital transformation trends & use cases in education
- Process Mining in Education: Use cases, Benefits & Challenges
- Top 5 Use Cases of Conversational AI in Education
Finally, if you believe your enterprise would benefit from adopting a RPA solution, visit our RPA software center, where you’ll find data-driven lists of vendors.
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