The socio-economic system where educational institutes exist today is extremely dynamic and competitive. As a fact, the scope and scale of forces confronting them have increased significantly over the past decades with challenges of a level not seen before. They are dealing with many issues lately including heavily restricted resources, lowered public financial support, increasing competition, rising threats to security, globalization and heightened accountability.

As such, the need for operational efficiency and effectiveness is needed more than ever. Revenue generation and academic quality are the two most cited drivers of decision-making in this context. Technology plays multiple roles in this process, from developing information to ensuring that student learning outcomes are realized successfully and that graduates are prepared from their root to the lives and careers in a globalized system.

The reason behind this situation is the fact that higher education has always had a kind of love-hate relationship with technology. But with the advancements and introduction of science, engineering and technology in numerous forms of study, it has been made possible to enhance a number of activities. These include information storage and retrieval, communication and more.

Let’s study how institutions are adapting technology to improve efficiency and effectiveness.

•    Business Intelligence to Enable Effective Decision-Making

Business Intelligence is defined as:
“A broad category of technologies that enable gathering, storing, accessing and analyzing data to aid decision-making in areas like budgeting, finance, customer relationship management, student recruitment and enrollment & academic progress.”

As a tool to educational institutes, it can be used to identify and measure the quantitative or qualitative elements for them to become more effective. It can also help to maintain cost controls.

•    Big Data Research in Educational Domain   
Data-driven research, coined as Big Data, has made it possible to detect significant patterns in large volumes of database. With institutions longing for years to have effective ways to deal with prime issues like improving student retention & graduation rates, the big data techniques has come as a boon. They are now using them to strengthen their efforts and detect predictive variables to improve educational outcomes.

•    Use of Software to enhance communication and institute management
Many of the educational institutes, including school, college and universities, are using institute management software to improve their administration process. The idea of bustling with heavy files is dying and technology is taking its place in every domain of management from recording employee details to managing student fees and other records. For example, EducationStack offers institute management software to many schools in India and is gaining wide acceptance. The software intends to handle every aspect of admin operation including student management, employee management, fee management, transport and inventory management, library management, online reports and more. It even has a module that supports sending notifications via SMS. It can greatly speed up the working efficiency of schools and colleges.

In the end, we would like to say that technology is being used in many ways to expand access to education, enhance student learning outcomes, enable greater efficiencies and provide greater institutional effectiveness.