Formal education teaches many things. It is essential that those things provide quality value to our lives. The logistical side of formal education is messy, to say the least. Good teaching faculty is difficult to come by and therefore schools are often understaffed. Students are not always given much choice about certain classes or class hours. Apart from this, they have no intimation of their attendance level and this often impacts their graduation. The institutionalization of formal education becomes too negatively hierarchical rather than focusing on what is important, which is the growth of young minds.
As academic professionals, one should treat education as a constant exchange. We believe that this exchange should be seamless. Technology comes into play here. There is a neat solution that large educational institutions or smaller schools can use. It is a custom web portal. Web portal solutions are for everyone. You have to get a custom portal development company to design one for you. Before you do that, let’s dive deeper and look at all the possibilities of using an education portal.
First, the basics: You must already maintain a database of all your students, admin staff and teaching faculty. If you manage this database in a CRM, these components can be interconnected. The right people can have the right access. The level of access will depend on whether they are a member of the administrative staff, teaching faculty or a student. Let’s break it down, to see what each level of access would enable what functions:
Admin level:
If you are an admin staff member, the education portal can streamline and aid your work to a great degree. As the principal of a school/college, you can see all the operations of your school.
Here’s how:
– With your data and resources being managed online, redundant paper-work gets eliminated.
– Personnel management streamlines with faculties managing their schedules, classes, and grading work using Education portal.
– You get an overview of the institute’s financial status with the fees & receipt management system.
Now, it may not be essential to monitor each student for you, but you’d easily be able to have an overview of the highest scoring students, or ones who are in the running for school-wide various competitions, or the topics of higher-level papers they are writing. You would also be able to look at how the teaching staff is doing in course completion, or in conducting extra-curricular activities; how they are doing their own research work or handling grading.
General Admin members can easily handle records of students and teaching faculty. They can assign classrooms for lectures, help students sign up for courses, ready a consolidated grade report for each student, arrange examination schedules, etc.
Admin Level benefits of Education Portal:
– Once an education portal is set up, it drastically cuts down on redundant tasks.
Lecture rooms won’t be double-booked.
– Professors would not have a conflicting timetable, and neither would students.
– They can also manage the fee details of each student so that the portal alerts the students and their parents when the fee is due.
Teaching Faculty:
A teacher’s responsibilities are not limited to merely teaching four classes a week. It is much more than that. A teacher can accomplish their tasks with relatively more ease with the help of an education web portal.
Here’s how:
– As a teacher, you can have all your classes at hand.
– At the beginning of a semester/year, when students have to register for courses, you would be able to see as students sign up for your course. Once that is decided, you can feed in details of each course and breakdown of each class. This way a course plan is set and you can keep a track of it throughout the semester.
– You can easily set assignments for students, grade them, mark daily attendance, accept medical leave requests from students and even request leaves for yourselves that the admin staff can approve.
– As a teacher, you can also keep a track of each of your student’s progress based on class tests, exams, and attendance record.
– If you need to take any extra session, you can add sessions to the portal which will notify your students that they have an extra class. The portal will automatically let you book a slot only when none of your students has another class.
You can see the calculation of students’ attendance percentage in your class, their grade percentage, etc. once the metrics are set. Then each faculty member can send in the grade report for their course so that the admin staff can create consolidated reports for each student that would have all of their courses and extracurricular.
Student level:
Almost all the modules that are available to students are with ‘view only’ access. Basically, this portal provides them with an overview of how they are doing during a particular academic year.
Here’s what they’ll be able to view/do:
– All the courses they are taking, and their timetable.
– All the grades; this helps in case they are lagging behind in one test. They can improve their overall graph, by working for the next tests.
– Students can use this portal to submit medical leave requests along with a medical certificate. The respective faculty member can approve it for their class and grant them the required attendance.
– They would be able to see their overall attendance, as well as a breakdown of each class.
-Students can submit their paper for rechecking when they get grades for any course. If the professor rechecks it, they can change the grade and the student can see the replaced grade. The change would reflect in the final overall/average grade too.
– After each semester, when the student’s entire grade is ready, they can see it and even print it. It would automatically include the school’s logo and important details like the affiliated board.
A school or college is a very complicated structure with plenty of variables. It shapes the lives of students and the careers of anyone who is interested in the way education functions, from professors to admin staff. Running a school is no mean feat. With more than hundreds of students taking a variation of over 20 courses each, it can be challenging to manage, especially along with managing what professor teaches what course and which student needs to get extra credits to graduate.
An education portal aims to streamline that complex workflow. Since a school would require an enterprise-level solution so that it can expand when it needs to, you can use a Dynamics 365 Portal solution that helps you address your pain points and helps you in your operations.
A portal development company can configure this Dynamics 365 portal tailored to specific needs. This will help you streamline your school or college operations.
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