Administration of educational institutions requires a wide range of systems to support key business processes. These systems should support the efficient and effective management of resources to deliver key aims and objectives. Technologies can have significant impact on efficiencies, particularly in relation to streamlining systems, linking data across institutions and preventing unecessary duplication.

Some examples of these systems include:

• student enrollment, payment and registration
• timetabling
• student records (attendance, achievement)
• assignment handling
• Curriculum Processes
• managing learning and teaching resources
• research processes and record keeping
• staff records

Several projects in the Curriculum Delivery programme saw value in looking beyond pedagogy and focussed on the wider student experience with the institution from initial contact to course completion. These revealed significant benefits in terms of efficiency savings, and provided evidence of cost savings and improvements to the student experience and service quality.

Making the Diploma a success (timetabling, attendance records, assignment handling)

• Lewisham cost benefit analysis
• Lewisham Assignments in Moodle case study
• reduction of staff time dedicated to issue Students with timetables and EMA records in Registry (at least 2 to 3 staff at peak time) approximately 600 hours of staff time and almost 8,000 printouts over the course of the year (project final report)
• The integration of different open source systems (Moodle, Mahara and ePDP) facilitates effective teaching that increases Student success and progression saving teacher and support staff time through more effective processes of monitoring and tracking progress  (project final report)

CASCADE (enrollment, online payment, assignment handling)

• Cascade Case Study - Leveraging technology to drive business performance
• Cascade Case Study - Using technology to support prospective students
• Cascade Online assignment submission resources
• Cascade Basic online payments
• Cascade Self managed student profiles system - technical requirements
• Cascade online assignment guides
• Cascade Short guide to on-screen marking
• During the project itself, time savings though the use of online enrolment and payment have already offered tangible benefits to the Department. For example, the Weekly Classes programme took 850 additional enrolments in 2009‐10, compared to the
  previous year, and at the same time reduce their staffing by 0.5 FTE allowing them to reallocate the staff effort towards  marketing and development of further new courses (project final report)
• ‘For the four areas of course administration examined in detail by the project, we forecast savings equivalent to over 38 weeks of productive administration time a year. These efficiency savings, and our ability to quantify them, have been useful when we
  have needed to make the case to fully embed and sustain these services going forward.’ (project final report)
• The greatest impact has been seen in the Department‟s Public and International Programmes division, which delivers the Department‟s two largest programmes (Day and Weekend Schools and Weekly Classes). In the 2009‐10 academic year, 5,683 (87%) of the total of 6,501 online enrolments taken by the Department were for these two programmes. As a result of savings made in course administration time both programme offices have been able to support an increase in the overall number of
  course registrations, for example the Weekly Classes (project final report)
• Programme took 850 additional enrolments in 2009‐10 compared to the previous year, and reduced their staffing by 0.5 FTE allowing them to redeploy staff  (project final report)

eBiolabs

• ‘by automating the coursework submission, marking and feedback processes we have significantly reduced staff workloads.’ (project final report)
• Once eBiolabs had been shown to producing real improvements in the student and staff experience there was no going back, especially as the running costs are minimal compared to the staff time required to produce the same end result. (project final report)