Abstract
Self-service is not primarily a technical problem – it is a organizational decision of the university’s management.
This contribution is divided into three main parts and identifies the social, organizational and economic background leading to the introduction and integration of self-service functionality into the administrative business processes within higher education institutions.
First, we describe several business processes, examine their suitability for self-service and evaluate that potentials in improvement they eventually pose to the involved personnel, student body and the institution as a whole. In the second part an optimal scenario describing technological cornerstones of and limitations to a new self-service approach is developed. What distinguishes successful from unsuccessful implementations and how should self-service components be integrated into larger frameworks? In the third part exemplary self-service functionalities are presented as parts of the integrated solution i3vÒ -Education for decentralized higher education administration.
Self-Service – why should universities deal with this?
When discussing self-service with university staff members and even some university managers, one often gets confronted with arguments like these:
"When all the work is done in self-service, my personnel will become unemployed!"
"Our processes are so highly optimized today, there is no potential left!"
1) A Student´s life changes
New approaches to forms of learning imply dramatic changes to the individual students.
Continuing political focus on increased student mobility, distance learning and teaching alliances between higher education institutions introduce new difficulties to administrative processes.
Before that, administrative systems were designed for rather immobile students, normally studying on a single campus. Nowadays, an increasing number of students conduct some parts of their studies outside their home university, within other countries or even on other continents. This implies that all these students cannot physically visit their student administration office every time they have to perform some administrative tasks.
New self-service mechanisms for taking care of these affairs in a student centric approach with minimal overhead are a necessity in this respect.
2) The work of the administrative personnel changes
In general, and especially in days of low state budgets, we face the fact that there is no funding for employing additional personnel. To the contrary, the university budget stays the same or is even cut, although, on the other side, new demands are put up by politicians and competition from other universities steadily increases.
Due to those new tasks, the student office has to change its philosophy from just administering students to increasingly acting as a consultant for them by dealing with their non-standard problems.
To accomplish this demand, it has to reduce standard tasks and move the free capacities to new functions which improve services not only to the students but also to the staff.
Introducing self-service methods can significantly support this goal by optimizing the workflows, thereby shortening overall processing time, and reducing the number of people involved in traditional manual work, so that existing personnel can take over the new tasks mentioned above.
Processes suited for self-service
In this chapter, various major business processes are examined which are suitable for student self-service and bring improvement for the involved personnel, student body and the institution university as a whole.
The student´s processes
Many of these standardized processes still require a lot of paperwork to be done manually. Therefore, feedback to the student is quite slow, not to mention the waiting queues still building up in front of the student office.
Business processes dealing with student administration involve, but are not restricted to:
Matriculation, enrolment and payment of matriculation/study fees
Matriculation is one of the most controversially discussed processes for self-service.
Many student-affair departments have invested much time, money and ideas over the past 10 to 15 years into optimizing this process and have reached remarkable results. Already in some universities, students have to visit the office only once or in some cases can even stay at home. Having reached improvements or at least being on the way, many departments state that there is no further possibility for optimization, and they are right – from their local view.
But when discussing matriculation, a parallel between mathematics and administration comes to mind – it is a difference between local and global optimum. Let´s look at some examples for this:
The first example is a very simple one. In many cases the student´s address is outdated or simply incorrect, with the result that many letters are undeliverable and are therefore returned to the department of student affairs. And such wrong addresses are not as rare as one would suppose; sometimes wrong addresses sum up to the quite high percentage of 30%.
The next one is the financial aspect; a student has to pay matriculation or study fees, he has to fill out the money transfer form which is submitted to him by the university and has to hand it to a bank. But experience shows, that in 10 to 15% of all matriculation cases, the fees are paid multiple times, partially, or with no chance to relate the payment to the student automatically. It is obvious that this does not increase the work for student affair department, but the financial department involved into the clearing process gets into considerable trouble.
The third example is that every student needs a different number of letters of enrolment confirmations. When sending them by regular postal mail, students often receive too many of them (and those documents are not necessarily cheap, because they are printed on pre-printed forms) and others have to get additional ones from the department of student affairs, where they once again have to wait in queues and generate additional work for the staff.
With a self-service matriculation process incorporating immediate payment
of study-fees, all these problems are solved once and for all. The address
is not needed anymore for matriculation but, as will be shown below, can
be corrected in self-service as well. The financial transactions are automatically
related in the correct amount to the correct student and multiple or partial
payment of the fee is effectively prevented. And last but not least, the
student is able to print out his letters of confirmation at self-service
stations all around the clock by positively identifying himself as approved
information requestor.
Address changes
When discussing the level of the quality of student addresses being kept in the student administration system, one will determine that there is a quite large number of incorrect addresses. What causes this?
There is a very simple reason: Up to now, address changes are requested from students in situations in which they do not have any interest of their own in correcting their address data. Normally, this takes place after receiving the matriculation papers, in the best case at home when opening the envelope, in the worst after waiting several hours in a queue.
To change this, it is one goal to design the process in a more convenient way for the student, but mainly it is necessary to ask for the correctness of address data in situations where the student himself is interested in updating the data. Such situations appear in different places, for example during the registration to an examination, the matriculation or enrolment, but as well while lending a book from the library.
Registration for examinations and issuing of documents
Another important process which can be optimized dramatically through the self-service approach is the registration for examinations and the issuing of confirmation documents.
In many universities, students are still forced to complete a very complex procedure to register for an exam. This means that there are up to four institutions with different consultation hours where the student has to appear in person, starting out with the students department over faculty and professor up to, in some cases, a separate secretary of examinations.
Based on a modern examination system, all these standard cases which require the students to spend hours and hours in administrative examination formalism can be processed in a fully automated manner through a self-service application.
The precondition for giving the permission to take part in an examination can be checked by the system itself, taking into account all the regulations of the respective study courses.
Instead of wasting hours and hours wandering from one office to the next, a student can regulate the necessary affairs at a self-service station within minutes.
And, as a second advantage, the staff of the student affairs department gains much time for providing consultation services to students with non-standard questions, e.g. studying in foreign countries, requests for non-standard examinations, recognition of credits gained within other courses or universities etc.
Lookup of grades and progress within the studies
In close relationship to the last point, self service offers the possibility for students to request information about their study progress.
Up to now these documents have often been issued manually within the student affairs department, again wasting time and resources. Based on a modern examination administration system, these documents can be produced within self-service stations immediately. This also allows the student to constantly monitor his progress through his studies, set milestones, and get direct feedback on his performance.
Self-service for students – the final cornerstone to administrative optimization?
As shown above, self-service for students is a quite important aspect for providing efficient and high-quality higher education administration, even though it definitely is not the one and only crucial point determining success or failure.
Quite as important is the decentralization of a large variety of processes which additionally have to be provided through the universities staff. The use of an integrated system, which decentralizes data-acquisition at the same time guarantees that responsibility for the data is located at the person who is responsible in reality.
The next chapter talks about some of these aspects which should be respected when dealing with the decision process for inventing and implementing self-service systems.
Technological cornerstones for successful self-services
This chapter focuses on an optimal self-service scenario, describing technological cornerstones and limitations to a successful self-service approach. Important aspects are provided to tell successful and unsuccessful approaches apart.
Last but not least it is shown that self-service components have to be integrated into larger frameworks if they are to become lastingly successful.
The technological basis for realization
The most important aspect of the technological basis for the realization of self-service applications for students is their integration into an integrated business process architecture for the higher education administration. Only this integration assures that all data is stored only once and is interconnected with all the processes within the university administration.
Such a system has to build upon a powerful database, a specialized application framework for higher education management. It has to be suitable to the different organizational units of the university and should provide a window that opens the university to the remaining world.
To create this window, it is clear that, especially for information-oriented applications providing services to many, Internet-based technology is the right choice. The application only needs a standard TCP/IP-connection which is available at almost any location throughout the world, assumed that the user has access to an appropriate computer.
But what should be done if additional requirements, e.g. printing in pre-printed forms or electronic payment, are to be fulfilled and these are not available at all locations?
At this point Internet-based kiosk systems for self-service applications are suitable solutions, because they can provide capabilities for integrated payment with lower fees than credit card companies offer, provide printing-capabilities on pre-printed forms and last but not least can offer video-conference based consultation services to the student.
The availability of such kiosk systems ensures that any student can carry out all the transactions that cannot be done in the Internet, such as immediate and secure payment or the issuing of documents like matriculation proofs etc. Especially in Europe an outstanding infrastructure for payment named electronic cash and electronic purses like the German "GeldKarte" or the Austrian "Bankomat Quick", offer certain advantages and should be used more frequently than they are today.
As an add-on to these functionalities, the university has the chance to make use of these kiosks, presupposed that they are multifunctional and capable of hosting advertisements by many providers, as a means of earning non-trivial amounts of money from advertisers which sell their products on these kiosks during off-peak times. In this context financing models exist which allow universities to get hold of kiosk systems through kiosk-providers without actually having to pay for them.
To ensure the correctness and the authenticity of the students transaction, the self-service applications should make use of digital signatures. As appropriate media for this purpose, cryptoprocessor Smart-Cards are recommending themselves as they can additionally be used as student-ID-card, as library-ID-card, as ticket for the public traffic, and many more functions.
Apart from these more technical implementational details, user acceptance
must not be forgotten. Key points are the easy-to-use ergonomic user interface,
the transaction speed of the application and, of course, security considerations.
These can inflate the introduction of self-service components to a major
task when non-standard software is being used or, in the worst case, solutions
are being reinvented from scratch.
Self-service within i3vÒ
-Education
In this chapter, real life examples of Internet-technology-based self-service applications will be given, which follow the ideas that were described within the last chapters. They are part of i3vÒ -Education, a system which has been successfully introduced in several European universities.
These applications can be seen and discussed as well within the accompanying exhibition where i3vÒ -Education with all its back-office and self-service-components will be presented.
Matriculation, enrolment and payment of study/matriculation fees
This Internet-technology based application integrates the cryptoprocessor SmartCard and provides all the functions mentioned above.
After the student logs in with his personal ID (the ID is not transmitted over the net but verified locally by the SmartCard), the matriculation or study fee can be paid with ec-cash or electronic purse at a self-service kiosk.
Optionally it is possible to mark the student’s SmartCard with different signs, e.g. applying a semester ticket for the public traffic system.
All these transactions are stored by i3vÒ -Education within the students vita, where entitled personnel can trace transactions performed by the student.
Address changes
The i3vÒ address change application shown in fig.2 can be integrated into different self-service-processes or be run standalone.
Therefore, it can be assured that the student is actively asked about the correctness of the address data at times when it is assumed that motivation for an eventual change is obvious on the students side.
Optionally, a digital signature can be asked for, so that it can be proven that the student indeed performed the questionable transaction.
Beyond this, i3vÒ -Education offers different possibilities for authorized university personnel to change the students address as well. For example they can change the address immediately if they do have contact with the student during some consulting or service affairs and are told by the student that the address data has changed.
Registration for examinations
With the i3vÒ -Education application shown in fig.3, students can register for examinations in self-service.
The student has only to log into the system with his account, optionally using a SmartCard or a PIN/TAN-combination, and can then decide to which examinations he or she wants to register for or from which examination he or she wants to resign.
All checks for validity of the registration are done automatically based on the results achieved by the student during the studies.
Of course, the staff of the student affairs department has the possibility to register students manually in special cases by using their i3vÒ -Education user-interface overriding standard preconditions according to entitlement.
Evaluation of lectures
As service-orientation gets more and more interspersed in universities, the need for evaluation of the lectures itself and their presentation by the staff become more and more important.
With the i3vÒ -Education application shown in fig.4, the students have the possibility to cast a vote about the lectures themselves and the lecturers who presented them.
It is possible to store individual questionnaires for every course administered by i3vÒ -Education. The catalogue of questions is published to the Internet via i3vÒ -Internet-Publisher as an add-on to the list of lectures available online.
The student identifies him- or herself, chooses the lecture to be rated and provides additional comments or appraisals into the web-form.
After that, all results are stored, optionally in an anonymous way,
within the i3vÒ -Education database and
different statistical analysis can be invoked by the staff and the university
administration.
Summary
In summary: Self-service applications for students need to be based on Internet technology, incorporate proven payment methods, provide an ergonomic user interface and implement security aspects as well. For certain aspects, the use of self-service kiosk-systems is recommended.
However, it has to be stressed that the use of the self-service applications must be closely coupled to the back-office system of the university, because it is necessary to integrate the data originating at different sources.
That such an integration can indeed be managed successfully was exemplarily shown in the previous chapter presenting different parts of i3vÒ -Education, the specialized integrated information system for higher education administration.
Further information about the ideas behind this architecture for specialized integrated higher education administration can be found e.g. within the conference proceeding contributions to EUNIS conferences 1997 in Grenoble and 1998 in Prague.
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