With a range of Education Management Systems (EMS) available for colleges, choosing what works best for your institution often involves navigating through a myriad of options.
To help make this easier, we spoke with Meshed Group’s CEO, Pramesh Khadka, one of our Corporate Affiliates, about what providers should consider when looking for an EMS.
‘When colleges purchase an EMS, this often means learning a new system and adapting their processes to fit the system. At Meshed Group, we approached this from a different perspective. Rather than creating an EMS that forces you to alter your processes to accommodate your new EMS, we created a system that uses the same processes that you follow. From student enquiries to completion,
a Meshed EMS is closely aligned to your processes resulting in minimal change’, says Pramesh.
By focusing on processes, Meshed can help English Australia members streamline their workflow, bringing much higher levels of efficiency. Ultimately, this leads to a better student experience.
Improving the student experience was part of the reason that Pramesh started Meshed Group, ‘as a former lecturer in Information Technology and Systems, I would see firsthand the impact that poorly designed systems had on students’, says Pramesh, ‘I also experienced my own frustrations as a user of these systems. I wanted to create something that would allow a provider to operate more efficiently using the best tools available’.
Meshed’s platforms delivers on this vision, offering numerous tools to streamline daily operations. Meshed Higher-Ed and Meshed RTOManager ELICOS are enterprise student management solutions that can help your college find the efficiencies that it has been looking for. These platforms are specifically designed for ELICOS providers and make managing key ELICOS processes much easier. Meshed RTOManager ELICOS can manage applications, enrolments, attendance, assessments and the financials, making it a comprehensive solution.
‘We built a system that is fully customisable’, says Pramesh, ‘which makes it easier for colleges to decide on the features that they need, depending on how their college operates. And of course, being fully integrated EMS, RTOManager ELICOS and Meshed Higher Ed support everyone in the college whether they’re staff or students. Being able to customise your EMS to suit your needs is a critical part of the selection process when evaluating what EMS will work for your college’
Considering your business processes is another important part of evaluating an EMS. The better these processes are understood, you will have a much clearer understanding of what your EMS needs to do. ‘Mapping out key business processes in simple flowcharts and thinking about how these are monitored and reported can help a college understand how their EMS can help them’, says Pramesh, ‘alternatively, creating user stories about user tasks can help identify what your EMS will need to do’.
Support is another critical area when considering an EMS. ‘Meshed Group has worked with providers across all sectors in the last 13 years, constantly evolving our products to improve them’, says Pramesh, ‘we’ve incorporated feedback from diverse stakeholders to fine-tune our systems. For instance, we created a promotion feature based on student nationality, which can be automatically allocated based on number of weeks of the student. This then feeds into the application process, generating a letter of offer and managing the student’s progress. This degree of customization is another benefit that Meshed products can bring to ELICOS providers’.
With these things in mind, Meshed Group can help deliver an innovative EMS solution for your college. Pramesh has over 15 years’ experience in the education sector and he can bring this knowledge to bear on showing you how technology can make managing your college’s day to day processes easier.
