Seven tools to run your institution online, not just live classes

Running an institution online is not the same thing as holding live classes. A live class covers one of the seven jobs a school, college or coaching centre does every day, and the other six are the ones that quietly stop when a campus closes: taking admissions, collecting fees, recording lectures, giving out notes, setting and collecting homework, and running examinations. A live-class tool on its own leaves you with six broken processes. Here is what each of the seven has to do, and why it is better to run them together than to buy seven separate products.

This applies to any institution that teaches — school, college, coaching centre or training provider — and it applied most sharply during the pandemic, when the admissions season and the lockdown arrived in the same month.

1. Online admissions

Admissions depend on people turning up in person, which is exactly what a lockdown forbids. With traditional means unavailable, students were left unsure where to apply and institutions were left with an intake they could not process. An admissions management system moves the whole thing online: registering students, documenting records, tracking applications and assigning courses.

The purpose is not to look modern. It is to let an application move without a person carrying paper between two rooms. An institution with this in place can open a new batch during a lockdown; an institution without it cannot, however good its live classes are.

2. Online fees

Fee collection used to mean cash, cheque or demand draft, collected at a counter. That was inconvenient for parents, who had to queue for it, and risky for everyone, who had to carry the money. Online collection moves the transaction to a few minutes from home.

The real gain is not the convenience. It is that the payment lands against a fee record instead of into a drawer, so the office knows who has paid without reconciling a bundle of receipts at the end of term. A fee system that only moves money is half a system; a fee system that also answers the question "what is due, from whom" is the whole one.

3. Live classes

A virtual classroom makes it possible to collaborate in real time and to deliver a lecture online. The instructor gets a platform that uses video conferencing to simulate a classroom, and students can ask questions and discuss just as they would in person.

This is the tool everyone thinks of first, and it is also the easiest to get right. It is, on its own, among the least useful, because a live class produces nothing a student can return to. Everything a student can go back to has to be recorded or stored somewhere else, which is what the next three tools are for.

4. Recorded lectures

If a lecture covers new terminology or difficult material, recording it lets a student play it back at their own pace and look again at the parts they did not follow the first time. That helps the student and asks very little of the teacher beyond saving and uploading the file.

A recording also quietly fixes attendance. A student who was ill on the day of a lecture is no longer a student who missed it.

5. Lecture notes and study material

Students learn in different ways and at different speeds, and handing them the material to read on their own time suits the ones who do not learn well from a lecture at all. The material should be built for self-study, and it should include e-textbooks a student can reach without going anywhere else for the subject.

One practical note. Notes are only useful if they can be found. A file posted into a class group chat is not a set of notes — it is a message, and it will be buried under the next message within the day. Material belongs somewhere it can be looked up, not somewhere it scrolls past.

6. Homework and assignments

Distributing and collecting homework is one of the most mechanical jobs a teacher does, and one of the easiest to automate. A teacher sets the work, the student submits it, the teacher reviews it, and the whole exchange leaves a record. That last part is what turns homework from a pile of paper into something a teacher can actually track across a class.

The gain is not just speed. It is that "who has done it and who has not" stops being a question the teacher has to hold in their head for thirty students at once.

7. Online examinations

When institutions and exam centres close, an institution still has to evaluate its students. An online examination platform lets a candidate sit an assessment from home while the institution continues to meet its own deadlines.

This is the hardest of the seven to do properly, for an obvious reason: an examination is not just a set of questions, it is a controlled setting. Reproducing that setting at a distance takes more than an online form and a timer, and it is worth being sceptical of any tool that claims otherwise.

What to check before you buy any of them

Seven tools is a lot of software to choose, and the temptation is to judge each one on its own feature list. That is the mistake, because the question that decides whether any of them works is not what it can do on its own — it is what it shares.

For each tool, ask where the student record lives. If the answer is "in each tool", you have not bought seven tools, you have bought seven lists of students that will drift apart. If the answer is "in one place, and the tools read from it", the rest tends to follow.

Ask a second question: what happens at the boundary between two tools. When an admission is approved, does the student appear in the class list by itself, or does someone retype the name? When a fee is recorded, does the finance view update, or does an accounts clerk reconcile it later? The boundaries are where the manual work hides.

And ask a third: how many places do staff have to log in to. Every extra login is a password to forget and a place where the wrong person ends up with the right access. One place to sign in, with what each person can see decided by their role, is worth more than any single feature on the list.

None of that is exotic. It is the ordinary test you would apply to any system you were going to depend on — and it is the one that, in a hurry, institutions skip.

One platform, or seven products

You can buy these seven as seven products, and plenty of institutions did in 2020. The trouble is that seven products hold seven partial copies of the same student. The admission record does not know the exam result. The fee record does not know which class the student is in. The notes do not know who is enrolled. Someone then has to reconcile all of it by hand, and nobody was ever hired for that job.

A platform that holds all seven is configured once — the institution, its classes, its terms, its subjects and its grading — and every one of the seven then works from the same definitions.

The other thing an integrated platform gives you is the message. When the class, the fee and the examination sit in one place, telling a parent about any of them is no longer a separate task.

None of this is exotic. It is the ordinary work of an institution, done through a screen because the alternative was no work at all. The institutions that came through the pandemic least damaged were not the ones with the most tools. They were the ones whose tools agreed with each other.

There is a version of this that costs nothing at all, and it is worth stating plainly. If an institution can only put one of the seven in place, it should be the one that keeps the record straight — admissions — because every other tool depends on knowing who the students are. If it can do two, add examinations, because that is the one whose absence is felt at the end of a course, when it is too late to fix.

The rest can follow in whatever order the institution feels most acutely. What matters is that each new tool joins the same record rather than starting a fresh one, because the cost of a tool is not what you pay for it. It is the work of keeping it in step with the six others, and that cost is paid every week by the staff who did not ask for the software in the first place.