There are three important activities performed by a student throughout a child’s life, as long as they are a part of educational institutions. First, they act as a guardian, role model, or ultimate care units for their child. This is important not only in the initial years of schooling but also later for emotional support through the hectic academic schedules. Secondly, parents support their children financially and perform as much of the extra activities as possible so that they get the ease of learning. this might include straightening up their room once in a while, making payments on behalf of them, helping them out to collect study material or repair for a project, and so on. Thirdly, parents act as advisors.
Over the years, the way parents care for their students has changed because of the way how institutions teach. Students now mostly attend classes over elements portals. Everything has become atomized and digitalized. Beginning from admissions to the institution through an admission management software, to the generation of report cards and other important documents at the end of a semester, everything is now accessible over a common platform known as a learning management system.
With this, the role of parents has become increasingly difficult because now they not only have to help their students out but also learn to use these automatic systems themselves. It might not be true for first-world countries, but in our nation, as a third-world country, our literacy and HDI rates still lag, we cannot expect the parent of every child to know how they can use individual digitalized software for all school tasks.
Institutes themselves also face several challenges regarding the automatic systems because they too have professionally trained teachers who do not have enough digital training, although they might be specialized in what they have been doing for years, which is teaching offline. Unless the institution already had availability of online classes before the pandemic, we cannot expect all teachers to be aware.
Hence, not only parents but also the institution administration faces difficulties introducing such automatic software. The only reason why they agree to do so is that it is soft on their budget since the same work through manual labor would take up salary, but the software requires only a one-time investment. Other advantages of online learning platforms outweigh the disadvantages and challenges, which is why institutions continue to adopt these methods.
Let’s have a look at a few challenges institutions face regarding a fees management system;
Challenges and solutions
- Although the entire system is supposed to be automatic a fee management system might need regular installment payments for updates, customer support for students, parents, and teachers, and other system support from the software company. A school should invest in the right software because it will make up for the manual official who used to work previously on the fees management system only if the software works better than a person.
- A fee management system also needs a moderator or separate administrative official to look over the work constantly. This challenge arises only if the software is inefficient, and can be overcome by choosing the right software when initially purchasing it.
- Students and parents who are unable to use a digital platform for payment of fees might land up in an unfavorable situation due to a lack of information or availability of incomplete information. This is a shortcoming on behalf of the institution, and the challenge can be overcome by allowing detailed blog lists on school websites or instructions conducted by teachers.
- Generation of fee reports takes a lot of time because it needs not only the confirmation on behalf of parents and institutions but also the accounting management from the bank service provider. This is a lengthy process and takes weeks at times because the portal for payment of fees remains open over a long period, and compiling the recurring data is time-consuming. There is no way to overcome this challenge depending on the accounting section of an institution for their efficient work. Better training could increase the speed at which the data is generated.
- Just because challenges exist does not mean that it is better than manual work. After all, a fee management system does not make mistakes and commit to miscellaneous activities while calculating payments!
