As the whole world faces a massive shift towards digitisation and has started adopting innovative technologies to make sure work, businesses, and day-to-day activities can be resumed again, the higher education industry as well is constantly evolving and digitising its processes so that academic continuity can be ensured, administrative burden can be reduced, faculty move away from administrative work and can focus on the academic part, students’ expectations can be met and they can return to campus in a safe way.
Bennett University is one such institution that is turning into a contactless campus, to address the challenges brought in by Covid-19 and to achieve much higher academic and administrative efficiency. Founded in 2016 by Times of India Group, a leading publishing house of India, Bennett University is located in Greater Noida and is popular for its serene 68-acre fully residential, modern campus as well as for offering more than 30 programmes across Engineering, Management, Media, Law, and Liberal Arts. As the pandemic has impacted all aspects of campus life, Bennett adopted some innovative solutions provided by CollPoll to tackle the problems being faced, to ensure seamless academic continuity, and adapt quickly to students’ expectations to offer them the best experience.
CollPoll, being a mobile-first AI-powered Digital Campus platform, aimed to bring a complete digital transformation at Bennett University. Thus, it started with the end-to-end implementation of the following modules:
Admissions and Fee Management: Admissions are the first touchpoint between any institution and the applicants. Thus, it becomes integral to create a seamless experience for administrators as well as students. With its admissions module, CollPoll automated multiple processes like application and document verification, with students receiving email and In-app notifications at each stage. With the fee management module, the online fee has been collected by integrating multiple payment gateways and offline fee records have been managed for reconciliation, along with dues collection of any sort, all through a single dashboard. In addition to these, Bennett also automated the student registration, enrollment ID as well as Microsoft Teams ID generation process on CollPoll.
Course Registration and Curriculum Management: Using CollPoll’s NEP-aligned Academic Management System, Bennett automated the entire curriculum management process as per its academic policies and goals. Through AMS, it could add and manage courses as per specialisations, create clusters of programme and department electives, and also offer open electives. Thus, enabling the entire student population to complete the course registration process on CollPoll and providing a seamless digital experience to both administrators as well as tech-savvy student audiences.
Learning Management System: LMS was the most needed module to ensure academic continuity, which was heavily affected due to the pandemic. Through CollPoll’s Classroom LMS, faculty at Bennett University could auto-create lesson plans, share resources such as documents, weblinks, etc., and most importantly, create and manage online classes through seamless integration with Microsoft Teams. Additionally, they have been able to create and manage online quizzes as well as assignments and also check plagiarism through Turnitin integration, to ensure academic integrity.
Infrastructure Management: Through this module, Bennett has been able to seamlessly manage all the campus infrastructure types such as buildings, cafeteria, laboratories, auditorium, among others, and also assign admins to these infrastructures. Along with this, venue booking requests have been managed through CollPoll, with real-time notifications on status and the option to chat with venue requesters for instant communication.
Faculty and Staff Management: Along with managing academic and non-academic departments, programmes and terms, curriculum and courses as well as student data, Bennett is using CollPoll for their Faculty and Staff record management, where they track and update the attendance and leave management process.
Campus Workflow Automation: Managing a wide range of workflows can be a daunting and tedious task for any institution but Bennett has been managing its workflows quite efficiently with CollPoll’s Campus Help Center (CHC), which is a self-service portal where anyone can raise a request which goes directly to the relevant authorities. Services like visitor gate pass, hosteller night pass, sponsored meal request by authorities, among others, have been managed on the CollPoll platform.
To further continue this journey to become a paperless, cashless, and contactless campus, Bennett University is going the extra mile to ensure student safety, enhance their experience, and enable contactless campus operations. Thus, it is now implementing CollPoll’s Hostel and Mess Management Modules to help students, staff and visitors avoid touching shared surfaces and interacting face-to-face.
Here’s the infographic to depict how these modules are helping the university build a digital campus:
[Students and Mess Staff at Bennett exploring CollPoll mobile app for meal availment]
In its journey to empower administrators, faculty and students, CollPoll is glad to have visionary institutions like Bennett who always thrive to create a seamless and comfortable experience for its stakeholders and we are proud to drive that change. Refer to this Blog to know more about our Mess/Canteen Automation Module or Reach out to us if you are looking forward to adopting more innovative technologies for bringing a complete digital transformation to your institution.