INTRODUCTION

Australian higher education was recently presented with a huge funding cut by the federal government – a 10% reduction in funding over three years for Universities, with TAFE’s hit even harder by a 24% cut. 

After a tough year, with international enrolments down due to Covid-19 and educational delivery severely impacted by the virus, Universities Australia has predicted that up to $16 billion in revenue will be lost between June 2020 and 2023. 

While figures show visa applications for students have halved (or more) since the onset of the pandemic, students already here in Australia continue to study and still require supporting services.  

Given the rapidly evolving educational landscape, how can we help institutions deal with the impacts of the pandemic, and be prepared for when restrictions eventually ease?

Doing More With Less

The federal budget cuts, along with the downturn in students from overseas, means University and TAFE revenues are down. From just over 756,000 international students in 2019, there are currently at least 200,000 less international students (513,000) in 2021.

As a result, Universities and TAFEs have less readily available cash flow, but must continue to deliver high quality educational outcomes to their existing key customers.

For those students that remain enrolled, one thing is certain – their need for educational outcomes – their degrees, certificates, and diplomas – are non-negotiable. 

It is the job of each institution to continue to ensure students complete their courses and graduate, and this is where we can help.

OUR EXPERIENCES

In the current situation, efficiency is key.  Students (especially international) must continue to interact with their institutions, teachers and courses to progress towards completion. Universities and TAFEs are facing new and unique challenges, delivering courses through virtual, physical and distance classrooms with less available staff.

While your student management system is a major part of your enterprise software landscape, we can almost guarantee that it is not the only component.  Modern institutions manage diverse and complex IT environments with systems deployed both on-premise and the Cloud, with varying levels of integration and automation allowing the exchange of information between components.  

We can help you determine the best way to deliver educational solutions for all stakeholders, from applicants through students, alumni and staff. We can help drive business improvement through automation, integration and better reporting.  More importantly, we can help you enhance or improve business processes to meet the challenges of the Covid-era through more efficient and effective utilisation and integration of the functionalities of your enterprise systems.  With our domain knowledge across the education sector, we would be proud to partner with you and bring our proven expertise and exceptional value for money to help you extract optimal value from your educational systems.

ESAM’S WORK

• Organisational Strategic Planning – assisting you to define your Customer First objectives.

• Change Management – identifying the best mechanisms to deliver efficient project outcomes that embed change management as an integral part of project delivery.

• Project Management – coordinating project tasks, timelines, managing budgets and stakeholders, reporting successes, and managing risks and issues.

• Business Analysis – understanding what you are trying to achieve and clearly documenting the outcomes you require to make sure our projects deliver results that meet your needs.

• Configuration/Reconfiguration – enabling additional Student Management functions or revising the way existing functionality works to better suit your business processes.

• Training – teaching your team how to use the software more effectively and efficiently, to robustly achieve your business requirements.

• Testing – ensuring your enterprise solutions work seamlessly together, as expected, and according to your specific business requirements.

• Implementation and Release Management – setting up new modules of the Student Management solution and supporting your team through upgrades of the software.

• Technology Transitions – assisting your teams when migrating your technology platforms from on-premise to the Cloud/SaaS.

• Integration – linking the Student Management solution to other enterprise systems through integrations using ETL, web services, data imports and exports.

• Reporting/ Correspondence/Workflow – using available tools to optimise reporting outputs, and form/workflow automation.

• Data management – data conversion, extraction, cleansing and migration, to help you move from legacy systems to new enterprise solutions and ensure that new solutions do not need to “start from scratch”.

READ MORE

To learn more about our work for higher education facilities, utility providers and super funds, click through to read our case studies.