3 big ways to use your EdTech to reduce the burden on university staff

As universities take advantage of the wave of innovations in EdTech, improving the learner experience tends to be a top priority. With the experience of staff - administrative and academic - often left as an afterthought. 

Taking care of your university’s staff as you embark on digital transformation has the power to optimise every process in your institution. From more efficient grading, to higher compliance and integrity. 

Here’s how you can make your academic and administrative staff’s life easier - and reap the rewards in every part of your institution. 

1. Prioritise UX (user experience) when you choose new software 

The useability of your tech has a direct impact on the inclusivity of your institution. If the software you use requires a high level of tech savviness, you can exclude academic staff whose job it isn’t to be great with tech. 

By choosing platforms that are intuitive and easy-to-use, you can save hours of staff time (and stress) across course set-up, teaching, marking and grading. So instead of battling it out with an old, technical program (or worse, a spreadsheet), you can free them up to apply their expertise.

Pro tip: When you’re picking new platforms, it’s a good idea to do a demo with a member of faculty who’d use it day-to-day, so you can see how they’d roll with it. 

2. Minimise the mental load by streamlining your platforms 

While many institutions create inefficiency by hanging on to old legacy software, it’s also easy to get over-enthusiastic, and onboard too many new platforms. 

There’s a lot of innovation and a lot of choice out there, but having too many separate platforms can increase the mental load on administrative and academic staff, and actually work to slow your institution down.

As you embark on digital transformation, look for platforms that can work together. For example, using a few different plug-ins for the same LMS allows you to increase the productivity of your tech, without increasing the mental load.  Unless there’s a platform that solves a problem that’s otherwise left behind - that’s a keeper too. By being picky and streamlining your tech, you can keep the mental load on staff low, and allow everything to run smoothly. 

3. Minimise the set-up required by academic staff 

While user-friendly, user-first tech is super-important, so is being able to assign the right tasks to the right people. With grading software, for example, if academic staff need to set up calculations in spreadsheets, this puts pressure on staff to be proficient in something outside their skillset, and it puts your institution’s accuracy and compliance at risk. With our grading platform, Grade Matter, administrative staff program grade calculations in advance, so academic staff can focus on the actual grading. This is a good rule of thumb to follow as you digitally transform more parts of your tech infrastructure: make sure your tech lets your staff work to their strengths, and better results will follow. 

By following these three tips, as well as a great big thumbs up (and maybe even a hug) from your staff, you have the potential to save hours of time across your institution, while you reduce risk to compliance, maximise inclusion, and optimise the accuracy of every process. 

At All the Ducks, we build bespoke platforms for universities to transform their digital infrastructure. Get in touch with our CEO, Shane Argo, to find out how we can help.