A custom system to control student performance reviews
UNSW custom software solution to meet their process needs to conduct student performance reviews
Antares built a custom app solution to automate, collaberate and make student performance reviews simpler and more transparent.
Client Problem:
The University of New South Wales (UNSW) is one of the most well recognised research and teaching Universities in Australia. The University was established in 1949 and now caters to over 50,000 students.
The UNSW Graduate Research School was drowning in paper. The School
was using spreadsheets to record and monitor Annual Performance
Reviews for Higher Degree Research (HDR) students. Its purpose was
to verify which HDR students had progressed sufficiently to proceed
with their candidature and identify who needed support. This system
was time consuming and inefficient, leading to high staffing costs
that was also prone to error.
To address this problem, the graduate research school wanted to
automate the performance review of HDR students to help solve the
problems involved with manual processing.
Our Solution:
Antares Solutions proposed a completely customised application (APR) to be integrated into a Microsoft SharePoint platform. The custom APR application within SharePoint would automate the review process and would include features to:
- Identify and manage students reviews based on set criteria.
- Automatically monitor and manage upcoming performance reviews.
- Provide storage capabilities for forms and information.
- Extract data and include reporting features.
- Communicate with existing back-end student systems.
- Provide solid and reliable integration with the existing third party University systems.
Benefits:
The University was able to save considerable financial resources because the Antares APR system combined the power of a new application with existing SharePoint infrastructure. The review process solution is now web-based and is a much more efficient system. It has provided the University with a variety of benefits:
- Identifies students who need a performance review to University staff automatically.
- Form and student information is held in a single location accessible on any computer.
- Streamlines the APR process across numerous departments that has helped save time and money.
- Improved data accuracy and reduced human data entry error.
- Provides real time data to staff.
- Hosting within SharePoint requires minimal training as the solution draws upon existing staff knowledge.