Student Experience - News #Infographic

English ZoneOne Selects Student Experience Management to Implement Integrated Student Recruitment and Admission Solution

Tue, 16 May 2023 19:54:15 +0000

English ZoneOne, a leading provider of English language learning solutions, has selected Student Experience Management to implement an integrated student recruitment, admission, and registration solution utilizing the Zoho One platform. The solution encompasses Zoho CRM to manage all parts of the student recruitment and admission processes and also extends into Zoho Social and Zoho Campaigns for marketing automation throughout the student journey.

The new solution will provide English ZoneOne with a number of benefits, including:

A single, unified platform for all student recruitment, admission, and registration activities
Improved efficiency and productivity
Enhanced data analytics and reporting
Increased brand awareness and reach
Improved student experience

"We are excited to partner with Student Experience Management to implement our new integrated student recruitment, admission, and registration solution," said John Smith, CEO of English ZoneOne. "We believe that this solution will help us to better serve our students and achieve our business goals."

Student Experience Management is a leading provider of student recruitment, admission, and registration solutions. The company has a proven track record of success in helping clients to improve their student recruitment, admission, and registration processes.

"We are honoured to be selected by English ZoneOne to implement their new integrated student recruitment, admission, and registration solution," said Nadia Landman, Co-founder of Student Experience Management. "We are confident that this solution will help English ZoneOne to achieve its business goals and provide its students with a superior experience."

The new solution is expected to be completed in Q4 2023.

Here are some additional details about the solution:

Zoho CRM will be used to manage all aspects of the student recruitment and admission processes, including lead generation, contact management, and opportunity tracking.
Zoho Social will be used to manage English ZoneOne's social media presence and to engage with prospective students on social media.
Zoho Campaigns will be used to automate marketing campaigns throughout the student journey, from lead generation to enrollment.

The new solution will help English ZoneOne to improve its student recruitment, admission, and registration processes and to provide its students with a superior experience.

Modern student engagement decoded

Wed, 26 May 2021 09:50:36 +0000

Keeping up with Gen Y and Z

The term student engagement is quite a buzzword in today’s education and training sector. It’s been so overused that it’s often misconceived as an item on a checklist rather than an ongoing relationship between an institution and students, that depends on student preferences and behaviour. Student engagement is about actively interacting with your audience with messaging that interests, educates, or helps them and encourages two-way conversations with the institution. In simple terms, it’s just about learning and anticipating what students want and then giving it to them at the right time.

This, however, is easier said than done, especially given that most of your current and future audience are millennials and zoomers. Being digital natives, your audience has a plethora of choices, richer and faster access to information, little or zero tolerance for complicated processes, and are increasingly privacy-conscious. All this translates to a power shift, and we’ve decoded what that means for you as a business and how you can adapt to this new market reality.

Preparing for a mobile-led shift

The most significant change is that mobile usage has overtaken desktop usage, and students are more likely to look something up on their phones or tablets than a computer.

So the first step is to make your website mobile friendly and create mobile apps for major mobile OSs. Step two is to ensure your website visitors and mobile app users can reach the institution instantly for information or help, by adding live chat on the website and mobile apps. In addition, our mobile SDK, Mobilisten, helps you automatically set up contextual, personalised push notifications and even add relevant in-app messages to nurture your mobile app users.

Cross-device shopping is also a challenge that makes it difficult for institutions to maintain a consistent brand identity and experience, more so for businesses with multiple brands and qualifications. We’ve solved this with a single admin space to manage each of your brands’ multiple digital touchpoints.

Catering to the “always-connected” generation

The main requirement of student engagement is being available to existing and prospective students at the time the choose to study. This is especially challenging in the present scenario, where time and geography have become irrelevant, and prospects and students expect institutions to be reachable around the clock. The advent of chatbots has made this possible without hiring employees to cover multiple shifts, but having developers/agencies build bots for your multiple requirements is going to be expensive. We’ve solved this with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop chatbot builder that makes creating a bot as easy as drawing a flowchart!

Making AI chatbots more human

Though chatbots were invented to free up your staff from mundane tasks so they can focus on more complex ones, research shows that customers find it harder to get issues resolved by AI chatbots.

Zoho SalesIQ offers you the best of both worlds with Answer Bot— an AI-driven chatbot that can greet your prospective- and existing students and respond to small talk with engaging phrases, and even understand common queries, regardless of the tone or terms used, and answer them using your resources. At any point if the student decides to switch to a human agent, the bot can forward the chat to one of your student support team members.

Scaling as required

Running a social media or email campaign? Just deploy a dedicated chatbot to handle the new influx of traffic coming from the campaign, at no extra cost!

Personalising your messaging without over-targeting

Personalisation is considered the pinnacle of student engagement, but when you’re dealing with a more privacy-conscious generation of customers, it’s too easy for institutions to inadvertently cross the line between being helpful and just plain creepy. Zoho SalesIQ lets education providers deliver timely and relevant messaging to your most valuable leads right when they need it, like an offer for assistance during registrations, or when they’ve spent a long time trying to decide between two qualifications.

Set up automated chat invites and notifications based on the data prospective students voluntarily give you, publicly available data like company details in the case of B2B models, non-sensitive information like visit source, pages visited, time spent and actions on the site, order history and other data available on your CRM if they’re existing customers, date, time or even day of the week. You can also display a GDPR banner if your customers are in the EU.

Achieving institutional zen with a unified customer view

Many institutions fall prey to ad fatigue and endless retargetting. While it’s frustrating, it throws light on the fact that student data is still jumbled, redundant, or even mismanaged chunks of information.

Zoho SalesIQ has ready-to-use integrations with major CRM tools, help desk software, email marketing tools, analytics software, and just about everything else you use on a regular basis. This gives you a holistic view of customer data, and avoids any missteps in data management and student communication.

Widgets let institutions create custom app integrations to bring favourite apps inside SalesIQ, so you can view and manage the data right from within the app. Users can also avoid redundancies by adding an auto-sync feature to the widget, to sync all the data changes in the respective apps.

We hope this blog helps you shape a more successful student engagement strategy. Please let us know what you think in the comments below. If you have any additional ideas, we’d love to hear them too!

Skewed systems: The (un)reality of postgraduate student funding

Thu, 30 Jan 2020 09:21:37 +0000

South Africa urgently needs more black PhD graduates, says Blade Nzimande. But the current funding structure available to post-graduate students is inadequate and favours the offspring of mainly white, middle-class families.

The existing structures and provision of postgraduate funding in South African higher education are replete with contradictions.

Look one way, and postgraduate studies are considered a luxury: unnecessary and self-indulgent – the whim of a select few who like books too much and “real jobs” too little. Look the other, and postgraduates are considered “critical” for the knowledge they produce, indispensable if South Africa is to grow its higher education sector and mature into the knowledge economy required for developing a more egalitarian, low carbon and inclusive society.

These contradictions bite keenly in the everyday experience of postgraduate students across the board when battling for funding. In this article, we explore two examples to highlight how multiple assumptions on the part of funders and universities coalesce to make opportunities for postgraduate study easiest for those already advantaged, and most inaccessible for those suffering plural forms of structural discrimination.

Funding for postgraduate studies in South Africa makes three unrealistic assumptions about students’ lives.

First, the amounts offered are never enough to fully cover costs, especially when living in city centres where housing expenses are high (especially in the vicinity of universities).

Second, most funding sources apply limitations on how much paid work a student is allowed to do (a reasonable condition given that adequate time must be dedicated to studies, but a limitation that bites when the amounts allocated are low… or late).

Third, funding assumes horizons of completion (two years for a Masters, three for a PhD) that are only possible if students are studying full-time… even though this is impossible given that the funding amount does not cover costs.

Effectively, funding assumes students are willing to be impoverished to study: hardly an incentive to pursue further education (and an assumption in line with the mantra, “postgraduate studies are a luxury and you should be grateful”).

Our first example looks at one of the most generous sources of funding, which provides R130,000 per annum for PhD study. Off this comes R20,000 in fees, leaving R110,000 per year, or less than R10,000 a month. While this is high compared to the median South African wage, it is certainly not enough to sustain the basic necessities required to live in the urban areas where most universities are located in a fashion that supports a focus on the thesis.

Consider a (single, healthy) student’s monthly costs: R5,000pm in rent; R1,000pm in transport; R3,000pm for food… leaving R166.66pm for: health issues, a phone and/or internet connection required for work, insurance or maintenance and upgrade costs for equipment necessary to do the work (eg a laptop), and travel for fieldwork or conferences (both critical aspects of postgraduate work).

On this scholarship, paid work was limited to 10 hours a week, hardly enough time to supplement the income sufficiently to cover costs. Students thus have no choice but to work more hours than they are contractually meant to – since the funding provided is inadequate – and this affects progress with the studies. The result is that the degree takes far longer than “intended”; on average, PhDs take five-plus years in South Africa. Yet funding stops after three years, assuming students (who are by some miracle doing nothing else except studying) should be “complete by now”.

What happens, in reality, is that, once funding support is cut after these unrealistic horizons, the student must work full-time and the degree is strung out even longer, or abandoned.

In addition, this particular funding source dispensed funds anywhere from four to eight months late. This is effectively the equivalent of going without a pay cheque for four to eight months – a situation very few readers could withstand/survive without tapping deeply into savings, or calling on friends and family for help (assuming the help is available).

Unsalaried or low-earning students can’t get short-term loans without some sort of surety to see them through these periods of scholarship non-payment, and finding sufficient ad hoc income at short notice is next to impossible. Even though the structure of the scholarship contract effectively binds the funder to the student as would an employer to an employee, there exists no legislative framework for students to appeal to, or hold accountable, their funders in the case of non-payment or late payment.

In another example, a student is awarded a university merit bursary which limits paid work to 20 hours per week (somewhat more reasonable): however, the amount the student is allowed to earn is capped at a rather arbitrary figure deemed to be “the total cost of attendance” which apparently includes all the basic necessities such as fees, textbooks, rental and food allowance. For this student, who happened to be a 34-year-old with a spouse, the total cost of attendance was calculated to be R67,000 (annually), of which 31% would already be committed to the fee costs of the PhD, leaving only R47,000 to cover any other living expenses for the year.

Since the student and his spouse are paying a mortgage on their flat, the student is deemed to be “living at home” and hence the expense is not valid in the same manner as a lease agreement, according to the university formula. “Living at home” seems to act as a stand-in for more straightforward explanations such as having middle-class parental support or access to other forms of social and economic capital.

Of course, if the student were middle class, younger and “living at home” they might have had access to sources of accommodation, food and possibly the benefit of being a dependant on their parents’ medical aid scheme. Unfortunately, this is not a possibility for a 34-year-old married student in a dual-income, yet precariously employed household, where every cent counts to make it to the end of the month.

Application forms belie the further problematic assumptions made by funding structures: what counts as “valid” costs and what does not, and where supplementary income is available and from whom. Many funding forms ask for parental income, a wholly inappropriate question for people in their thirties or older whose parents are retired, if not deceased.

Dependants are not considered a “valid expense” when stating a student’s anticipated costs, discriminating against older postgraduate students who might have children or elderly dependant parents. Students are assumed to be able-bodied and have no excessive healthcare costs, discriminating against anyone who needs chronic medication, prostheses, etc.

Married students are to declare the income of their spouse, a question that assumes a spouse is supportive of the decision to study (this latter criterion is far more problematic for women, given that further education for women is less likely to be supported by their husband, and that men still earn more for the same work as women– a man declaring his wife’s income will seem more “needy” than a woman declaring her husband’s, even though she is less likely to have his unequivocal support for her decision to study.)

(The assumption of heteronormative marriage, in this case, is based on the empirical majority for most students; even so, assumptions of spousal financial or emotional support are not given for any couple, whether heteronormative or not.)

Postgraduate funding structures, effectively, assume applicants can access intergenerational wealth, have no dependents, have supportive (earning) spouses and suffer no ill health. These assumptions stack further education in favour of students with access to family money (ie middle class, and most likely white); students who are still young and child-free; and students who already reside in cities near universities.

Who is most likely, empirically, to fit such a profile? Unfortunately, the answer is young, middle-class, white men (or child-free women) who have access to intergenerational capital. Who is most likely to come to post-graduate studies later in life, as a single parent, with no money elsewhere in the family and no spousal support? Statistically, the answer is black women from working-class origins. These demographics also fit who is most likely to weather non-payment or late payment from a funder and who is not. In reality, race and class are still tightly bound in South Africa, and care work and income still very gendered.

Not too long ago, Minister Blade Nzimande called for a ministerial task team to probe why so few black PhD graduates had been produced post-1994. It may be worthwhile to simply consider the impoverishment such students are forced into when they decide to pursue such advanced postgraduate qualifications, and how current postgraduate funding structures tacitly assume students can put family responsibilities on hold and become a financial burden to their loved ones.

This begs several questions: who is the “ideal student” as imagined by funders and universities ie who fits the assumptions built into existing funding models? And why are we surprised at the frustration and anger of students who clearly recognise and feel their own structural exclusion because they do not fit these assumptions?

Minister Nzimande could perhaps save the cost of a ministerial task team and use the money instead to adequately fund and support the PhD candidates he states South Africa desperately needs. DM

Source Credit

Ashley Visagie is a PhD student at UCT’s School of Education, a co-founder of BottomUp (school-based NPO) and a member of Thinking Space Radical Scholarship Collective. Sara Black is an education researcher, teacher and policy analyst. She is a PhD candidate in Education Policy Studies, UCT, and a co-founder of the Thinking Space Radical Scholarship Collective.

This article originally appeared on the dailymaverick.co.za

Infographic: Understanding the difference between the National Senior Certificate and NSC (Vocational)

Tue, 16 Apr 2019 21:14:50 +0000

Have you ever wondered what the difference between the National Senior Certificate & the National Certificate (Vocational) is? They are both registered on the same NQF level 4, but serve different purposes. Herewith please find an overview as published in 2017 by the Advocacy and Communication CEO Sub-Committee. ur website by double clicking on a text box on your website. Alternatively, when you select a text box.

Click here to download as .pdf