Community education providers need all the help they can get when it comes to managing diverse programs. Here’s three SMS features that help.

Australia's community education providers face the challenge of building reinvigorated operations in the wake of Covid-19. Through the pandemic temporarily dampened student demand, there is now a pent up desire to engage with learning and community again.

This will help providers grow thriving community education organisations for the future.

Technology can support this effort. As students enrol in higher numbers and providers seek to grow their programs, innovate, or grow stronger learning communities, technologies like SaaS student management can underpin flourishing communities to enrich lives and local life.

Three student management features for community colleges

As a leading provider of Student Management Systems for Australian community education providers, ReadyTech is at the coalface with local providers, their boards and their teams as they build efficient operations, engaging learning programs and thriving communities.

Community colleges come looking for us for different reasons. A few of these stand out as critical. Below, we look at the importance of managing online enrolments and payments, streamlining workflows and centralisation, and beefing up data management efficiency.

1. Online enrolments and payments

Streamlining enrolments is a high priority for most providers of education. Community colleges are no exception. As the community in general now expects streamlined online experiences like they get in retail or travel (especially following Covid-19), educators are having to level up.

Enabling online enrolments and payments enables students to peruse course information, make a course decision, and pay all at once. From a student’s perspective, it removes barriers that might exist between them and attending the community learning experience they want.

For providers, it means removing the administrative burden of things like managing in-person payments or phone inquiries. It provides a platform for scalability when providers are expanding their courses and operations, and ensures smooth links to other finance functions.

At a more advanced level, levelling up the enrolments process can allow providers to capture more rich, relevant information about their students, that may assist with things like learning delivery preferences or the cross-sell of related courses in line with their learning interests.

2. Streamlined workflows

Like many not-for-profit organisations, community education providers have often grown organically over many years, leading to processes and technologies that may not always link together very well, or are heavy on manual processes that require more time and cost.

Student management systems help move community colleges forward into a more streamlined education world. They help bring the functions of education business and the people within them together, through connected, streamlined, centralised workflows.

This means that processes can become more coordinated, and supported by automation, so a provider can manage the diversity and volume of their education and delivery operations without things getting overlooked. The system does the heavy lifting for the provider.

From a community service perspective, streamlined workflows mean a much better student experience. Whether it is timely processing of enrolments, course communications, or certifications, the system supports workflows that maximise the student wow factor.

3. Data management efficiency

Community colleges have a lot of student data to manage. Often, this data can be spread across multiple systems, spreadsheets or even paper forms. This means it can be difficult to retrieve at will, and use when required for things like compliance reporting or marketing.

Student Management Systems ensure community college data is centralised through migration or integration into one place. Data is instantly available to users in their flow of work, ensuring that time and money is not wasted and students are serviced more efficiently.

For example, ReadyTech student management systems arrange data into the likes of Kanban views and system dashboards, allowing providers to instantly visualise their position, so they can understand and act in more informed ways to progress their provider forward.

Core functions like VET compliance reporting are streamlined within the system to enable efficient completion of tasks like AVETMISS reporting, while features like our finance hub give board members distilled overviews of the financial position, making their task much easier.

Technology supporting the future of community education

The role of technology in community colleges is to help build engagement, learning and outcomes within communities. Through more centralised, professional and efficient operations, students and teachers can focus on what matters - great education and learning.

ReadyTech is chosen by community colleges because of its proven track record in the the sector. When colleges can trust their technology partner and it enables them to do what they do better, this translates into enriched communities and lives with providers at the centre.

Interested in learning more about how we help community colleges with next generation enterprise student management technology? Learn more here.