Zoho Creator helps SRM University on their journey to a paperless process.

Every institute has unique processes to manage academics. But the basic process flow is somewhat similar for all of them. It's often a sequence that can be roughly described as:

Admission > Course registration > Course delivery > Evaluation > Graduation

At the SRM Institute of Technology, which is the engineering wing of the university, management was looking for a solution that could automate the course registration process.

SRM's course registration process is:

Course allocation > Course registration > Faculty allocation > Room allocation

The sheer volume of students that they had to manage was the main problem. Organizing and processing tons of paper documents on students, courses, exams, and more took a toll on management and faculty. It also led to delays in the institution's process.

They started searching for a solution that could cater to their specific needs, and that's where Zoho Creator came to the rescue. Using it, they were able to set up an initial version of the system they required in a matter of weeks. The core of the system is a course allocation and registration module.

The module lists all the courses that are available to students of different departments in a specific semester. Students select the courses they want, and based on the number who have enrolled, management allots the faculty. If multiple instructors are teaching the same course, students can then select the one they prefer.

With more than 20,000 students, course allocation and registration used to take weeks. Now it happens within two days—and without a single sheet of paper changing hands.

Once the faculty selection process is completed, management allocates the rooms and time slots for the courses. The Zoho Creator app organizes this data and generates a personalized class schedule for each student, with details about the selected courses, faculty, timing, and room number. That is, a unique schedule for each of the 20,000-plus students of the institute. Imagine how much manual effort this would have taken!

Once they had this system in place, they started adding more modules to further automate their process.

The faculty uses the Zoho Creator mobile app to record students who are absent from each individual session. It then generates reports for the faculty, showing the class attendance percentage, and reports on the individual attendance percentage per course for the students.

The students are required to take a variety of internal and external tests throughout their courses. The internal performance also contributes to their final grade, and it's recorded using the internal credit entry module. Students can view their own performance, while faculty can check both individual and overall performance for the course they teach.

The management at SRM University understands that feedback helps refine the course structure and course delivery. Who better to ask than the students themselves? After completion of a course, the feedback polling module is sent to students.

In addition to the above modules, some of the latest improvements they are planning to implement are

• a marks aggregation system for the University's practical exams
• a goal-setting system to evaluate and support the professional growth of the faculty members