Running an accredited educational organization, I know the sheer volume of record-keeping, compliance, and reporting obligations institutes face. It's no surprise that teachers and admin teams lose valuable time in data entry, tab-switching, and copy-paste.
At Accellier, a registered training organization in Australia, we've automated away much of this using tools like Zapier, freeing our people to make valuable, meaningful connections with students.
Anyone who's worked in an accredited education setting knows about the mountains of information, records, and resources that institutes have to maintain. We love teaching, yet we dread the record-keeping that comes with it. The student should be the centerpiece of education, but all the data that needs to be shifted around results in what I call a "wall of administrivia," blocking students and educators from connecting and learning.
There are countless opportunities for automating and integrating the apps that teachers and administrative teams use.
Automation helps us get the right data into the right systems, error-free and in near real-time to ensure regulatory compliance. Teachers can collaborate as a team around students, especially when marking assessments and providing support.
Some of our most valuable and time-saving automated workflows were created and tested in under 20 minutes without needing to code.
This has been one of the greatest returns on investment for us. As skilled and qualified specialists, it makes little sense to waste precious time clicking, typing, copy-pasting, and tab-switching. Every minute wasted on easily automated manual data work is valuable time lost for tuition, support, and learning.
To say we're obsessed with reclaiming that time is an understatement.
Rather than planning and rolling out a massive automation effort, I have found that it's best to target one task, even a sub-task, and automate that before moving on to the next. This has four key benefits:
If you're seeking inspiration for your first automation project, here are some tips I've found particularly useful when automating at Accellier Education:
One of the first things I automated was creating a new Trello card when a student submitted an enrollment form on our website. Enrollment is an extremely important and high-value activity, so it must be well-managed.