Implementation of RPA in the Educational Sector

Abstract

In today's world that embraces the modern educational system, technology plays an essential part in automating repetitive, rule-based work. Automated education systems open the way for the elimination of paperwork and manual operations with the use of software for admission procedures, scheduling meetings, tracking attendance, assessing assignments and grades, and financial management. It is quite challenging for the teachers and the administrators to perform all these tasks while providing the right career path for the students. Furthermore, administrators are tasked with a variety of responsibilities, including ensuring the smooth and effective operation of educational activities and institutions. 

Robotic process automation, or RPA, is a new type of software-based automation. RPA-based software bots can minimize tedium in manual and repetitive procedures in labour-intensive jobs. As a result, RPA is widely used in a variety of industries and fields. A few RPA use cases for the Education sector were examined in this article. The ease of use of RPA bots, as well as their potential benefits, will make it easier for institutions to use RPA, resulting in more effective data gathering and analysis, as well as greater operational efficiency. While RPA bot construction is straightforward, maintenance and long-term perfect operation necessitate a significant amount of software engineering labour, which institutions considering RPA for automation must factor in. 

Introduction

Current technologies are transforming entire ways of working and opening new opportunities for invention and creation for the entire globe. When it comes to education, Various tasks of education are paper-based, and most of them are repetitive, tiring, and time-consuming.  Automation technologies are becoming an increasingly important and meaningful part of human life. With robotics process automation (RPA) technology, the education sector is about to transform. RPA provides a road to digital transformation for traditional businesses. It focuses on eliminating inefficiencies and wasting human resources' effort while doing routine tasks. The educational domain includes teachers, students, and other beneficiaries. For trainers, students, and academic administrators, automation technologies such as RPA can present an efficient working process that depends on algorithms and software robots (bots) to complete tasks without the involvement of humans. Figure -1 depicts the benefits of RPA in the educational sector. 

In simple words, robotic process automation is a distinct digital technology platform that enables the execution of time-consuming, paper-intensive, or repetitive tasks with greater efficiency and a lower error rate. RPA technology provides educators and university staff with a tool that not only simplifies their work but also saves time and resources. Teachers and administrators will have more time to manage many responsibilities because of the technology, which will also save money, boost productivity, and improve job quality. 

RPA use cases in the educational sector 

Let's look at some possible RPA applications in the educational sector. Figure-2 depicts a few use case situations. Stakeholder (faculty, students), back-end (purely administrative), and hybrid use cases may all be split into three groups. 

When it comes to dealing with repetitive tasks, RPA may be a reliable efficiency driver. Teachers and administrators will have more time to manage a variety of jobs because of technological advancements, saving money, increasing productivity, and improving work quality. Furthermore, even if they have fewer personnel to perform tedious duties, universities and institutions can get things done without a hitch. Some of the most important RPA Intelligent Use Cases in the Education Industry are listed below. 

Management of Attendance– RPA technology may be used to track student and staff attendance and deliver daily weekly, or monthly reports to the appropriate parties. This makes it easier to set up meetings with parents of students whose attendance falls below a given threshold. Staff may also view their monthly attendance report, which includes statistics on the number of leaves taken as well as additional reports such as overtime benefit calculation and so on. 

This Use Case can be easily implemented using RPA tools. For e.g., UiPath has the following activities to implement this use case. 

1. Read Range Activity – To read students’ attendance from the excel sheet to DataTable.  
2. For Each Row Activity - Used to loop over each row in a  DataTable. 
3. If activity - Used to check if the student is Absent, Present. 
4. Assign activity - Used to increment the value of a variable in a loop, sum up the value of two or more variables and assign the result to another variable.  
5. Output data table - Writes a DataTable to a string. 
6. Write Range Activity -Writes data from a DataTable variable to a spreadsheet. 

Building Student Grade Sheets– RPA can be used to automate the process of creating student grade sheets during exams. RPA technology automates the process of manually entering grades into each student's report, making it faster and easier. Each student's grades for all courses can be retrieved from a central database, and each student's scores can be entered into a system before being merged to produce report cards. Furthermore, the technology allows teachers to send report cards to their students' parents via email. 

The following UiPath activities can be used to automate this use case. 

1. ‘Open browser’ activity to access the Institution ERP where all the marks are available. 
2. ‘Get Text’ Activity can be used to extract all the required fields like Name, USN and marks, etc. 
3. Using the ‘Typeinto’ activity all the fields can be copied to the ‘Grade Sheet’ template. 

Student Enrolment and Registration– Student registration and enrolment are two of the most time-consuming procedures that necessitate not just a lot of paperwork but also good administration. A single misplaced document can be disastrous, but RPA can easily replace this time-consuming human procedure. RPA solutions may assist in precisely completing the whole registration process, from collecting student data, authenticating papers, and analysing eligibility requirements to collecting registration payments and delivering a confirmation email to students. 

The following UiPath activities can be used to automate this use case. 

1. ‘Open browser’ activity to access the Institution ERP to register Student details.
2. Read Range Activity – Reads student details from the excel sheet to DataTable.
3. For Each Row Activity - Used to loop over each row in a DataTable. 
4. Using the ‘Typeinto’ activity all the fields can be copied to the Institutional ERP. 

Financial Reporting– Since most of the students choose educational loans for higher education, university or college administrative personnel must personally examine each form, confirm the eligibility conditions, and process it further - which takes time. Payroll processing and fee management may also be automated with RPA. An educational institution may quickly construct numerous fee groups, build scholarship applications, or decide on any optional charge (tuition fee, university fee, etc.) with RPA. The RPA activities on PDF & Email automation can be used to implement this use case.  

Conducting Meetings– Throughout the year, an educational institution organizes several meetings, such as parent-teacher conferences, board meetings, faculty meetings, and so on. Preparing a meeting agenda, sending out email invitations, and re-sending updated invites (if the meeting is cancelled) may be a time-consuming and exhausting process. RPA technologies like excel automation, Email automation make it simple to schedule meetings and distribute invitations to all attendees by triggering the process in the orchestrator. 

Online Classroom Education– With the COVID–19 pandemic spreading around the world, more educational institutions are choosing online classes or learning. Teachers, on the other hand, must manage a variety of activities in today's online learning environment, such as managing attendance, verifying, and grading assignments, and tracking course progress. Robotic process automation can manage both offline and online learning processes effectively. Each student can be given an RFID chip (Radio-frequency identification) in the form of an identity card, which will automatically note their attendance as they enter the building. Once the attendance or grade is available in Excel or PDF. RPA can make use of the excel or PDF automation activities to generate the report and email it to students using the activities like SMTP. 

Staff Hiring and Payroll Management– RPA may be used to select new applicant applications and schedule them for interviews in the same way it can be used for student registration. The technology can suggest a well-deserved salary range for the candidate (based on his or her previous experience, qualifications, and industry standards) to the interviewer. It may also be used to assess current staff members' attendance and establish their monthly pay eligibility. Adoption of robotic process automation (RPA) does not imply the end of administrative positions; rather, it will minimize human dependence on routine activities and allow organizations to focus more on value-based roles, resulting in increased productivity in less time. Universities and other educational institutions are rapidly identifying RPA use cases in important administrative operations like course scheduling, attendance management, online learning, and other areas where it enhances the student experience, minimizes human error, and saves time. All these important use case benefits may be realized provided educational institutions strike a careful balance between automation and human interaction. Intelligent data conversion service providers recognize that using smart learning technology helps educational organizations stay competitive. 

Extracting research data– Instructor research data from Google Scholar or other databases such as Scopus or Web-of-Science, such as details of articles published, citation counts, and h-index, must be collected by all higher education institutions. An RPA bot that scrapes research data from Google Scholar regularly for all instructors can be created using the UiPath Studio and the Orchestrator. The RPA bot retrieves each instructor member's Google Scholar Profile URL from a custom database and retrieves relevant data for each instructor, such as research article information, citation counts, h-index, and i10-index, to populate the custom database. 

After that, a research dashboard is created with granular metrics for a person, department, and institution, as well as year-over-year comparisons. Bots like this may be created for specialized research databases like Scopus and Web-of-Science to assist in automatically compiling data.  The bot initially connects to an internet site that contains faculty members' Google Scholar profile URLs. It then goes to each of the Google Scholar URLs one by one, scraping publication/citation data and adding it to the database. The analytics engine is also used to compute research analytics at the faculty, department, and institution levels. 

Tracking alumni– Tracking alumni is a time-consuming process for all institutions that requires a lot of human effort. An Alumni Tracking RPA bot can be created with UiPath Studio that leverages students' saved LinkedIn profile URLs to monitor them over time. This technique does not involve student participation and relies only on information that is publicly available on their LinkedIn pages. As a result, an alumni dashboard is created with a full profile of the students, including their current employment, industry, location, contact information, and higher education information from their public LinkedIn accounts. To implement this use case the UiPath uses web automation to extract the Alumni details from LinkedIn by extracting the LinkedIn URL from excel. 

Social media sentiment tracking– Institutions are increasingly turning to social media channels to increase engagement with their students and the public. Institutions must monitor stakeholder reactions and levels of participation in their different social media posts. A bot can be created to monitor user reactions to the institution's postings on several social media sites, including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and generates post-level analytics across platforms, platform-level analytics, and weekly and monthly engagement and sentiment analytics. This aids the institution in developing stronger social media interaction tactics with the public. This use case can be implemented using Natural language processing integrated into UiPath. 

Faculty screening– Tracking faculty applicants requires significant human effort which involves- receiving resumes over email, downloading them, categorizing/classifying, screening, making lists, and initiating communication with the applicants.  

An RPA bot can be designed and implemented, which automates the following screening process. 

• Downloading all candidate resumes and email content from a given email address. 
• Sorting and classifying resumes into different categories based on department and job profile/levels. 
• Creating a customized database by parsing resumes and extracting important information using NLP libraries. 
• Verifying applicants' eligibility against the eligibility criteria for a particular profile/level. 
• Sending emails apologizing to candidates who did not meet the minimum qualifications. 
• Disseminating the final sorted lists to those who need to know. 

The UiPath activity like IMAP is used to read the email based on the Email subject, excel and PDF automation is used to process the document, and finally, SMTP to send the email to the concerned.  

Certificate generation– An RPA bot can be designed and implemented that can produce certificates and authenticate student records automatically. Students can request the delivery of a required certificate through an online portal. As soon as the request is received, the bot analyses it, searches the ERP, checks whether the prerequisites for delivering the certificate are met, auto-fills the certificate, and creates the certificate in the right format. The bot can be set to work unsupervised or under supervision. In the unsupervised mode, the certificate can be delivered to the student immediately, with a copy provided to the administrative department, but in the supervised mode, it is shared with the appropriate person in the administration section for approval before being sent to the student. 

To UiPath activities like table extraction and workbook activities can be used to implement this use case. 

Data collection and alerts for jobs– From all angles, institutions are continually on the hunt for work prospects for their students. Job openings must be gathered from a variety of sources and then classified according to profile, relevancy, eligibility criteria, pay, location, and technical qualifications. An RPA bot that receives job advertisements from many sources, collates the information, filters, classifies, and categorizes it, and then sends out alerts to the training and placement team for further processing can be built and implemented. The RPA bot would use Uipath activities like ‘open browser’, ‘get text’, ‘screen scrapping’ to search the web for contact information for these companies and send out introduction/invitation emails for campus recruiting or internships using SMTP activity.

Official Regulations– Key announcements from regulatory organizations, universities, accreditation bodies, and other essential web sources must be kept track of by institutions. This is something that an RPA bot can handle fast and effectively. The RPA bots keep an eye on the All-India Council for Technical Education, the University Grants Commission, the Science and Engineering Research Board, the Department of Science and Technology, and the NITI Aayog (planning commission), among other sites. The corresponding RPA uses technology of web scrapping to scrape the web pages of interest on these websites and send out update notifications. These Alert alerts are then distributed to the users who have registered. 

Initiation of the administrative process workflow– Several administrative processes can be automated within the institution. The Robot can be programmed to perform administrative activities based on a schedule. The bot looks at the calendar and begins the duties that have been assigned to that day. Some of the processes that can be automated are listed below. 

• Collect relevant input from a variety of stakeholders regularly. 
• Students receive email reminders for semester registration, fee collection, and exam notifications via the ERP. 
• ERP-based report production and dissemination to authorized users  
• Faculty appraisal initiation and data pre-filling from the institutional analytics framework  
• Important institutional actions and deliverables are being reminded to key officials. 

Faculty teaching assistant– A teaching assistant bot can be created to support faculty members in conducting online courses on Google Classroom by doing the following tasks: 

• Content from the faculty folder is uploaded to Google Classroom regularly. 
• Download student assignments from Google Classroom or any other learning management system (LMS). 
• Copies and pastes text from assignments into a plagiarism checker. 
• Maintains a database of plagiarism reports for each assignment. 
• Compiles a list of students who have and have not submitted assignments. 
• Totals marks from online examinations, assignments, and other sources to calculate grades. 
• Maintains student records in the ERP system.  

Website updation– An RPA bot can be triggered that auto-updates specific pages on the institutional website from a shared folder, allowing non-technical people to update the site without relying on the technical staff. This saves a significant amount of time and effort. 

Limitations/challenges 

RPA has received little attention from academics, as shown by the scarcity of research literature in the field. Furthermore, many institutions are uncertain about which operations to automate and whether the jobs identified are suitable for RPA. Institutions have no confidence in their ability to embrace RPA due to a lack of in-house knowledge. Bots are static code, making them inflexible at run time. Thus, they require regular code changes during their lifecycle. As a result, a dedicated development team will be required. 

•  Bot functionality is regularly broken because of changes in the structure and format of target web pages. 
• The number of bots used for a variety of purposes might quickly grow, presenting maintenance challenges. 
• When scraping data, bots are ill-equipped to handle complicated processing logic, necessitating several iterations on scraped data to reach the desired result. 
• Captchas and other visual barriers on websites might affect bot accuracy.  
• Exception handling in bots should be prioritized, as the bot should explicitly disclose what data was unable to be processed and why. Bot activities and the quality of their outputs may be jeopardized in the absence of high-quality exception handling. 
• Because bots operate in the foreground and cannot be run in the background, several user accounts must be set up on the same workstation to run bots. 

Conclusion 

In the education industry, there are several advantages to automating operations that cannot be ignored. Teachers and administrators have more time to focus on their main goal: delivering the greatest possible education for students, and students have more time to work on their studies. A cutting-edge and unique no-code platform helps educational institutions automate all their workflows and procedures by allowing them to construct simple to large enterprise-grade apps in hours rather than weeks or months. And this is all done without writing a single line of code.