Saturday, September 29, 2012

How Online Admission Enrollment Processes Are Facilitating Colleges and Universities?

Technological advancements have significantly revolutionized the admission process, especially in the recent times. Colleges and universities can now take help of the online admission enrollment process for registering new students for different courses and also promote their institute, worldwide. The online admission option, which comes embedded with the cloud-based class management solution, will help in dealing with the different managerial and administrative tasks such as conducting registration, collecting payments, maintaining student database, generating reports and other promotional activities, which was never so easy earlier. Taking up your admission process online will not only streamline your managerial activities but will also help in increasing your ROI, as more students opt for the online services to take admissions in premium colleges and universities.

Conduct multiple activities single-handedly:

The online solution, which offers varied features and functionalities, helps you in planning and implementing the registration process in a faster and strategic way within few minutes. Details about the different courses, programs and even the pricing structure for enrollment can be easily added to your registration page along with logos, graphics and photos of the institute. This will give a professional look to your page and will draw the attention of more students. While you are taking your admission process online, you must consider the accessibility of the services. As the online solution offers access to the admission services 24x7, your potential students can register for their chosen course or program, anytime, sitting at a comfortable place. Thus, the online process can offer a rewarding experience to your students as they will no more have to stand in long queues for filling up the forms manually and making the payments.

Most colleges and universities often find it very difficult to deal with the post registration activities, which include sending confirmation mails after registration and payment completion, tracking the database, preparing reports, etc. The online solution offers e-mail notification facility which helps in sending automated confirmation e-mails to each registrant after successfully completing the admission and payment process. Payments can be accepted via credit cards; PayPal and other such gateways and the entire database of transaction and registration can also be maintained and recorded online. As the transaction process is fully secured, students can comfortably share their card details for paying the admission fee.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Ten Ways to Ensure Effective Online Learning

Online learning has become a panacea for all of us who find ourselves without enough hours in the day to accomplish what we need to do. The last thing you want is an online training course that is not clear-cut and leaves a lot of questions for the learner. Both content creators and learners want easy-to-use, effective courses that will provide the necessary training without a lot of confusion.

Here are some design tips for content creators that will ensure effective training courses:
  • Always include a navigation screen at the start, even if you think the learners have participated in online learning before. The navigation screen should have clear and simple instructions so any learner can easily progress through the course. By making navigation easy, learners can focus on the course content.
  • Free up navigation. Make sure learners can easily go back to previous screens if they need to review any material for a better understanding.
  • Pay attention to the layout of each and every screen. Avoid cluttering screens with too much information. The screen should be pleasing to the eye and designed to draw the learner's eye to the most important information.
  • Include a glossary. Never assume that the learners will understand jargon, technical terms or acronyms. The glossary should be comprehensive and explain key terms in plain language.
  • Include regular quizzes to check the learners' understanding of the content. Instead of having one huge test at the end of a course, it is better to have shorter tests at regular intervals throughout the course. Regular tests and quizzes are a good way for learners to measure their own understanding and build their confidence.
  • Give learners the option of finding out more information if they need to. You could include a box on some screens saying "Want to know more? Click on this link to learn more about..."
  • Provide a contact person for questions. If the learners do have questions, is there someone they can contact?
  • Ask another person to check the course to see if it makes sense. If you have access to proofreaders, they can point out any content that is unclear. Alternatively you can ask a pilot group of learners to go through the course. Ask them to offer feedback on points they thought worked, or didn't work.
  • Engage in continuous improvement. Even when you have published and released your course to learners, there is still the opportunity to gather feedback and make improvements to the course. You could include a survey asking learners if there was anything they found unclear. This is a great way for you to keep learning about the learners' perspective and to remind yourself that you are designing courses for real people.
  • Distribute your course effectively.

Fitting Education In a Busy Work Schedule

A sound education is of utmost importance in order to productively participate in the workings of the corporate world. This is the prime reason why executives everywhere are waking up to the need of brushing up their education and skills in order to rise higher in their work environment. This need is being met by a number of online courses that have been set up by various prestigious institutes. More and more professionals from different domains and walks of life are joining in for these courses and aiding their skill set with fresh knowledge.

It is vital to keep supplementing one's knowledge with fresh perspectives. The industry is dynamic and ever evolving. Things and scenarios change at the drop of a hat. A well versed skill set goes a long way in helping out with the technicalities of the problems faced by the professionals in their day to day corporate life. All these factors contribute to the importance of enhancing one's qualifications. The format and features that are offered by different executive programs available online vary, while they are all same in essence. They provide professional learning at reduced costs and time investments and are the most convenient modes of earning a viable professional degree.

Regardless of all the plus points that an executive education brings to your career, people shy away from going in for such a course because they face the difficulty of somehow adjusting a class in their busy schedule. It is often seen that professionals, despite wanting to resume further studies, grapple with the problem of time management, and cannot fit education in their tight schedules. Also, another hurdle is the family responsibility that one needs to assume at some point of time or the other. All this is taken care of by online education programs. With more and more esteemed colleges joining the league and providing solutions for professionals so that they are able to pursue education without leaving the comfort of their jobs. Since the participants of the program are from a working environment, special care is taken to schedule the classes in a manner such that they fit in everyone's routine and not be a hassle for any participant.