Rishi Kulkarni is the CEO and Co-founder at Revv. Rishi started his entrepreneurial journey 10 years ago when he founded 1Click, which was acquired by Freshworks. He spent the next few years building and selling products at Freshworks. Besides managing the product and mentoring the young fledgling startups, he has a ‘green thumb’ and is a health and fitness enthusiast.
Online education is no small feat. It is not merely about the teachers and the students donning headphones and communicating over the internet. It is where digital technology blends with pedagogical practices. It is about creating a smarter, faster, and better virtual education infrastructure that enhances the learning experience. Covid-19 has made educational institutions suspend physical classrooms. It pushed the institutions to undergo a revolution and adapt to this emerging teaching method of online learning. This flash transition has left many institutions trapped in the vortex of document management and paperwork challenges. The pandemic has emphasized the importance of a smart online document management system to digitize and distribute documents in a secure environment.
How can the online document management system overcome the challenges of online education/learning?
Online document management is about drafting, sharing, and tracking the digitized documents in a secure environment. It frees up the administrative staff, teaching staff, and the students from the chaos and back-and-forth of hefty paper documents, and enables them to focus on their primary work.
This “new normal” is predicted to be the “new future” even in the post-pandemic world. Online education has become an integral part of institutional resilience and pedagogical progress. This implies, moving forward there will be an integrated approach to leverage physical classrooms and online learning. It demands a seamless online collaboration tool to connect the academic institutions with students, parents, and teachers.
“If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow.” – John Dewey
While teachers are plodding along with this “new normal” shift, it has thrown some deeper challenges.
Here’s a list of all such problems and the best solution that enables digital document management in classroom learnings:
Online payment collection
The transition to online education has pushed the institutions aggressively to ramp-up their online platforms. Student registrations, fee payments, subscription-based online classes, additional paid resources, etc. – all possible tasks have moved online. Seamless payment experience has become an essential part of daily operations. Most document management systems allow smooth integration with the institution’s software, and enable the institution to generate automated invoices to the customers.
Curriculum alignment
With no physical classrooms, teachers find it hard to comprehend whether the students have understood their curriculum objectives. This misalignment and lack of awareness can become a stumbling block in a student’s academic progress. When sharing the course guidelines, curriculum break-up, timetable, etc., it is vital to track whether it is received and reviewed. A document management system makes such communications transparent through its “accept/reject” feature. For example, without robust electronic document management for schools, the curriculum documents are shared directly via email. Sometimes these land in junk folders, and sometimes these are missed, and eventually stay unopened.
Such documents, when distributed with the right document management software with the “accept/reject” button, make the record management easier. Hitting on the accept button signifies that the students have gone through the entire document and are profoundly aware of how to proceed with online learning.
Connection
Virtual classrooms hinder peer-to-peer connection. In a physical classroom setting, students frequently share their doubts and problems with their peers and seniors. With no such channel available online, it blocks students’ learning and growth. This can shoot up the anxiety in students.
Working together with peers fosters a greater sense of community in a digital environment. A smart document digitizing software and a great collaboration tool must have chat and tagging features. It empowers students to bring back those fruitful conversations. Such collaboration –
- Enables them to collaborate with their peers, tag them, post questions, receive direct feedback, and support one another.
- Helps to collaborate with other students on projects/papers.
Assignments and projects
Assignments facilitate gaining more knowledge on a subject. Sharing feedback on such assignments and answering any queries related to the topic is equally important for a teacher. But doing it through email or video chats for each student becomes a herculean task. Imagine how a teacher will cope in situations where she runs multiple assignments in multiple classes for several students. A collaborative document management tool empowers teachers to:
- Share assignment guidelines with an “accept/reject” button to ensure the students have acknowledged the prerequisites of the assignment.
- Readily organize student assignments in folders and categorize them; this makes the navigation easy.
- Collaborate with students and share feedback through tags and chats.
Content sharing
During a class, teachers often need to provide their students with supporting resources/handouts to aid their learning. With online classes, the challenge is how to:
- Deliver such content and course materials?
- Make it accessible to all the students
The right document management tool will allow teachers to:
- Share the curriculum content online.
- Tag each student to make sure they get notified and receive it.
- Track who has opened it and how many times.
And, allows students to:
- Have easy access to all course materials, slides, documents, notes, etc.
- Receive weekly / monthly updates that quickly summarize the learnings, assignments, and course material plan for each week.
- Easily organize their documents in folders.
Sharing exam results/report cards
The report card is a testimony of a student’s academic and personal progress over the year. But, creating numerous report cards online, distributing, and tracking them becomes an uphill battle. With the right document management system, you can
- Design and produce report cards with customizable templates, where you can easily edit and format it based on your need.
- Notify students and/or parents to view report cards.
- eSignature of parents and students to track who has viewed the report cards.
- Organized folders for easy navigation and time-saving searches.
Conclusion
Online education can be very challenging. It is a prime responsibility of institutions to bring back that spark of learning, and level-up the learning experience. A robust document management system can help institutions and equip them with the right resources.
- It seamlessly connects students and teachers with the institution.
- Promotes a stimulating learning environment.
- Makes access to learning and resources a breezy task.
- Creates a remarkable online learning experience.
Drop the inhibitions and commence your online learning the right way.