From little ideas, big change grows.
As Coordinator of the Academic Registrar’s Communications Unit in 2008, a key responsibility was the effective management of student records. As well as obligations under the State Records Act, 1998 (NSW) and other instruments, procedural fairness requires that reasons for decision-making are recorded and available for review. In a multi-campus university where electronic correspondence was emerging as the dominant form of communication between students and instructors, how could staff find the time to upload copies of emails to the correct location in the TRIM records management system *every* time they answered a student enquiry? Was there some kind of button they could press?
An unscheduled conversation with the Records Manager and a supervisor who could see the potential benefit in a modest expenditure to solve a larger risk exposure led to the RAMS@TRIM project. In the end, it didn’t cost much and it didn’t take long for a competent developer to add a component to the system where all staff had to do was to CC their student emails to a specific address, and they were automatically captured and assigned to the right student record.
So far, nearly 3 million communications have been captured, with low cost, effort and infrastructural overheads. I love it when a plan comes together.
share the love
