Android Based Student & Providers Manage

Enterprise Mobile application

Android based Students and Providers
Administration and Management Systems in
New Zealand Largest Tertiary
Education Provider

Client

Te Wānanga o Aotearoa is one of New Zealand’s largest tertiary education providers. For the past 30 years, TWoA provided an alternative within New Zealand tertiary education sector for 30 years, enhancing the skills and employment opportunities of more than 50,000 graduates. Operating from over 80 locations throughout the country, they provide a unique learning environment and comprehensive range of certificate to degree level qualifications to New Zealanders of all ages and walks of life.

Business Challenges

Ability to access systems from remote places of operation with anytime access on any popular mobile device.

Lack of efficient and automated solutions that can resolve issues of curriculum management, admissions and performance measurement.

Ability to meet the new standards/ benchmarks set down in the tertiary education reforms.

Conflicts expectations of various stakeholders – Students (Tauira), Kaitiaki (tutors) and Providers.

Problems of management of courses and lack of cross functional communication.

Increased administrative operations and management of their business operations in terms of headcount and space.

Developing positive and high quality exit transitions for students.

Engagement

Covalense Global was commissioned to undertake the enterprise application development for management and administration of Students (Tauira), Tutors (Kaitiaki). Known as Providers Administration and Management System (PAMS). TWoA was earlier using four different applications to manage their providers across New Zealand. Covalense Global built a unified system with following features, the system monitors and administer the management of providers, students and tutor’s activities; attendance, progress and assessments of courses; Kete (student resources) dispatch and management; real time payments to the providers and interaction with NZQA approved student database like Take 2. Since home based learning (HBL) offered by TWoA is accessed across New Zealand, there is a business requirement to port the enterprise system on mobile devices like tablets and mobiles for the students and staff. PAMS was initially developed in Microsoft.Net framework and later the enterprise application has been ported on Android framework for anywhere anytime accessibility for the providers.

Covalense Global developed an Android based numeracy and literacy programme known as Papa Kupu that will enable the students to learn the programme curriculum and run through via videos.

Android platform has quickly established itself as a dominant mobile OS for enterprises and the new releases with enhanced security features such as default encryption, increased protection against brute-force attacks, secure device-sharing features etc with consistent and unified way to manage enterprise apps has increased the adoption of android devices in the enterprise.

Business benefits

Android platform is most suited for inter-application integration and inter-process architectures. With rich set of libraries, the framework is easy to operate from technical standpoint.

Being Opensource without any royalties, Android has low barrier to entry without any costly licensing fees or development tools. Unlike other mobile platforms, Android can be distributed in a variety of ways.
PAMS application has ensured higher level of focus for the students (Tauira) and Tutors (Kaitiaki/Kaiako) ensured higher involvement with students than with administrative issues. Greater levels of student engagement lead to higher levels of retention. The turnaround time of the business process involved in student extensions/re-enrolments was reduced from 3 days to few minutes.
PAMS provides a single screen interface to access 50 critical student information needs and the performance enhanced through new system architecture with server centric data processing, software configuration and DB performance tuning strategies. All internal student and provider activities of TWoA were migrated into a single unified solution and this has further reduced the support and maintenance costs.

Access/indexing of 500,000 digitized student documents on the fly with integration of enterprise document management system