Student Management has changed. The digital expectations of modern learners have forever been transformed by the likes of Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube and Netflix. The education marketplace is more competitive than ever, in ways that most educators (and legacy student management systems) are ill-equipped to cope with, let alone embrace.
The old models of student engagement no longer meet the needs of students who demand flexibility, a sense of control, and a feeling of individuality.
Traditional student management solutions are transactional, administration focused, finance-centric, and leave out people.
Integrating disparate systems is key to meeting the digital service and engagement expectations of the modern student, but this can be difficult and costly.
A powerful, integrated, and flexible platform that puts people at the heart of the student management journey — students, educators, administration staff, faculty members. people sms uniquely combines the key operational functions required to effectively, compliantly and economically run an education and training organisation, with flexible, intuitive, integrated tools that enable great student experiences, increased student engagement, and drive positive learner outcomes.
For enterprise level training and education providers, who are seeking an integrated solution across the student lifecycle, or have outgrown the capabilities of their small SMS solution, people sms is a game changer for those looking to support and empower a student body of between 1,000-40,000+ students.
From prospective students to enthusiastic alumni advocates, people sms prioritises people at every stage of the student lifecycle, while intelligently reducing administrative burden and ensuring compliance requirements are met.
Fusion5, who developed people sms, had been working with education, higher learning, and training providers for years. A theme emerged around the challenges our customers were facing.
Simply put — the world changed, and the legacy student systems they were running no longer met the needs or expectations of their people. Not their students. Not their educators. Not their business services staff. No-one.
Focusing on transactional and administrative functions ignored the experiential needs of those interacting with the system. The fundamental architecture no longer served the environment it was operating in, and we knew there was a better way.
So we developed people sms.
By understanding the competitive environment education and training providers operate in, the impact of the digital age on customer expectation, and the key areas that caused our customers the biggest headaches (multiple non-integrated systems, siloed data, clunky and slow user experiences, manual administrative and compliance burdens), we created a solution that puts the needs of people (students, educators, office staff) at the centre, and lets automation handle the transactional, administrative, and compliance functions.
This shift in focus empowers them to tackle the challenges that were holding them back, leap-frogging them into a stronger, more competitive, more value-adding position. And the student experience at every stage of their learning lifecycle leaves them engaged, delighted, and acting as enthusiastic advocates.
Attracting prospective students is key to increasing student enrolment numbers. people sms benefits both the student as well as recruitment teams and partner agents by integrating marketing, registration of interest, eligibility criteria screening, and fast-tracking offers of placement to increase the likelihood of enrolment.
By connecting systems and data in automated ways, prospective students get the kind of communication cadence they have come to expect, which improves their experience and perception of the organisation. That communication is also targeted to their specific interests, making them feel that they are being treated as valued individuals, increasing their levels of engagement.
For the organisation, significant time is saved by reducing double-entry, removing the need to manually process registrations of interest and checking eligibility criteria. In addition, actions such as sending of offer packs are automated to include all useful and relevant documentation as standard.
people sms helps you find, communicate with, and nurture prospective students, and makes the transition from enquiry to confirmed enrolment seamless.
Students in this day and age expect instantaneous responses and feedback. people sms enables a great student experience by making the process from application to acceptance to enrolment feel fast and seamless.
Thanks to intelligent automation, not only are robust eligibility assessments undertaken using past and current academic records, but invoicing, course allocations, and digital delivery of course materials are managed through automated workflows. Time saved, errors reduced, students impressed!
Historically the transition from application to enrolment was manual and required double-entry, introducing the risk of errors, and was time-consuming.
With people sms, applications are converted to enrolment with a single click of a button, and all the wrap-around actions and documentation are activated automatically.
Keeping students engaged is the key to achieving great learning outcomes. And it’s not just the course content that drives this. Engagement is about people and their activity. For students, it’s about easy access to the information that’s important to them — academic, attendance and progress records, as well as anytime access to a self-service portal to find information and request services.
Employees also perform best when highly engaged. With people sms, the tutor and faculty portal provides academic staff access to student information, attendance data and class schedules, and also provides the ability to record and track assessments. This eases administrative burden and frees up more time to spend on students.
The people sms academic framework supports different types of training offerings including short courses, Business to Business training, Diplomas, correspondence/distance learning, and workplace apprenticeships. With a platform this powerful and flexible, your options to extend your educational services and offerings, even if only for a short time, is significantly increased — meaning you can respond to market demand more quickly, and capture revenue more effectively.
In addition, people sms is able to differentiate between student types e.g. international, domestic, B2B, and create unique workflows to best serve their needs — delivering a personalised experience!
Where you will find people sms really comes to the party is around student support. A student who is struggling often only comes to the attention of the institution when it’s too late to support them back into success. With people sms, the real-time progress calculation management ensures you can identify slipping grades or poor attendance patterns early, and target student support to those who require it, when they need it.
The tutor and faculty portal enables educators to easily capture and record attendance and assessments at source, providing quicker turn-around time of results and progress information, whilst still allowing the registry to manage quality assurance, auditing and release of results as needed.
Finally, people sms will help you optimise your funding allocation, by streamlining and automating your compliance process. Gone are the days of huge spreadsheets and hours of reconciling student numbers monthly, quarterly, and annually. With people sms, meeting your compliance obligations simply becomes part of a seamless, well-managed process.
At all times, your people — students, educators, office staff, stakeholders — are prioritised to achieve great learning outcomes, and have simplified engagements that minimise fatigue.
Graduation is a huge affair for any higher education institution. The logistics alone can be overwhelming, and often it isn’t a matter of just a single event. On top of that there are large volumes of communications, paperwork, eligibility checks and last-minute updates to be managed.
Because people sms tracks student achievement in real-time, you have far greater insight into likely numbers for your graduation and associated events, plus you can use the system to manage venues, dates and times in a single location — giving you an accurate and detailed view of all the relevant moving parts at a glance.
Marketing and communications are made simple too, with pre-formatted, personalised invites (that can include links to existing websites and webforms to capture RSVPs and other data). Plus, you will have the ability to send updates and reminders via text to keep students informed. You can also integrate people sms easily with marketing automation tools if required to give a seamless, end-to-end communication tool and data capture solution.
Finally, where an institution is working with a job search, graduate program, or any other kind of job opportunity program, people sms has the capability to match student skills and education against job descriptions, and employers, to help increase job placement success.
We all know that word of mouth is the best kind of advertising. Once a student graduates, it’s easy to lose touch, and the goodwill they had for your institution based on their awesome experience can fade away, and along with it their power as a valuable word of mouth advocate. Additionally, your graduates represent a rich target market for repeat business through continued or extended study.
people sms makes it easy to maintain relationships with past and current students and keep them in the loop about programs and courses they might find useful or interesting, based on data held in people sms about their interests and what they’ve already studied.
You can also keep them engaged with news of institutional and fellow-alumni achievements, as well as inviting them to events, or sending them notifications about potential career opportunities using the HR Module.
Having a student management solution with a platform powerful and flexible enough to accommodate changeable course configurations, and then being able to scale those new courses to be economically viable, is your secret weapon to building competitive advantage.
With vocational relevance now playing a big part in further education and training, a one size fits all education experience is no longer going to hit the mark with students, funding providers and employers.
Using people sms, providers will be able to build up new education offerings by configuring competencies and units that allow students to gain the skills and experience that is relevant to their professional development. Rather than developing courses in isolation, administrators and academic staff can design courses that reduce duplication of delivery, and keep delivery costs to a minimum, while still providing students with a high quality of education and training.
Automation, curriculum configuration and planning tools provide the necessary foundations to scale delivery to respond to large shifts in education demand, through to being nimble enough to provide niche education solutions to specific industry sectors.
See people. in action
Having a student management solution with a platform powerful and flexible enough to accommodate changeable course configurations, and then being able to scale those new courses to be economically viable, is your secret weapon to building competitive advantage.
With vocational relevance now playing a big part in further education and training, a one size fits all education experience is no longer going to hit the mark with students, funding providers and employers.
Using people sms, providers will be able to build up new education offerings by configuring competencies and units that allow students to gain the skills and experience that is relevant to their professional development. Rather than developing courses in isolation, administrators and academic staff can design courses that reduce duplication of delivery, keep delivery costs to a minimum, while still providing students with a high quality of education and training.
Automation, curriculum configuration and planning tools provide the necessary foundations to scale delivery to respond to large shifts in education demand through to being nimble enough to provide niche education solutions to specific industry sectors.
The delivery of successful educational outcomes no longer needs to be guesswork and analysis after the fact.
By capturing key data such as enrolments, student activity, academic performance and day to day operations into a single system, educational institutions can gain insights that will allow smarter decision making and enable them to take faster action. For instance, monitoring student activity across a range of metrics can give real-time awareness of engagement levels, attendance, achievement and progress. Observed separately, a single ‘off’ grade may not seem significant, but when combined and reported on as an overall picture, a disengaged student may be supported more effectively, early on, reducing the risk of failure or dropping out.
Also, people sms captures metrics such as class sizes, demand for specific qualifications and the popularity of elective units – all of which can be used to ensure that effort spent in course design and delivery supports real world demand. It also gives institutions valuable forecasting data so they can accurately budget and plan for resources such as tutors, classrooms, and educational support materials.
