Documentation in Education

Educational Organizations Generate Large Volumes of Documentation

The functions of an educational organization include:

• Education: Developing syllabi, course materials and training programs, and providing training to students. A huge amount of documents would be used and created in the course of these activities. This is a specialized field by itself that we cover only briefly.
• Student Administration: Student admissions, maintaining sports & other facilities, recording students performance, regular communications with parents and guardians, fees collections and issuance of course certificates falls under this function. Student records would contain a great deal of data - student applications, interview performance, admission details, contact & personal details, courses taken, attendance details, credits, progress reports, billing & payments of dues, achievements in different areas and particulars of certificates issued.
• Financial Management: Educational organizations are typically always short of funds. They have to develop competitive training facilities and organize different projects. The costs of these are not likely to be covered by fee income and educational organizations have to depend on donations from well-wishers and manage their funds tightly. Financial management typically involves budgets, control systems, up to date accounts and timely management reports.
• Fund Raising: Depending as they do heavily on donations, educational organizations have to maintain good contacts with prospective donors and create a good image about themselves in the community. These require regular communications with past donors and alumni, direct marketing campaigns targeted at them as well as prospective new donors and research to locate donor prospects - all document intensive processes.
• Alumni: Past students could become lifelong supporters and donors. This would involve keeping up their enthusiasm and loyalty. An interactive Web-based forum open to students and faculty is one excellent way to do this. Such a forum would have to be initiated, promoted, moderated and maintained by the educational organization.
• School Store & Cafeteria: Unless controlled along business lines, these facilities could worsen the tight finances of the educational organization. Portions control, materials control, costing, pricing, budgets and management reports are the means typically adopted to ensure business-like operations.

Main DMS Requirements

Providing access to reference and research materials, facilities for collaborative working, easy document creation and updating, and version control facilities would be important for course materials and programs development.

Student administration would involve up to date capture of student information and making the student records available to faculty and parents/guardians. In the case of the latter, access should be strictly restricted to the records of their wards.

Conclusion

Organizing training materials and facilities, sports and outdoor activities, student administration, fund raising and managing the school store & cafeteria along business lines are the major functions typically performed by educational organizations. Considerable documentation would be generated in the process.

We look at document management in educational organizations on a separate page.