Using Workflow for JotForm for Your Academic Institution
Creating a more positive student and faculty experience with approvals
Students, teachers, and administrators are bogged down by paperwork and manual tasks that can be easily automated. Dropping a class after the drop-add period often means filling out paperwork, bringing it to a professor to be signed, and trekking to the registrar’s office during office hours.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Automating the approval process not only saves time, it’s more convenient and reliable. In the case of dropping and adding a class, an integration like Workflow for JotForm allows students to submit requests from anywhere, at any time of day. Professors can submit their signatures via email, providing the registrar with a real-time record of all drop-add requests without having to enter any information. Last but not least, the dreaded line outside the registrar’s office is eliminated.
With Workflow for JotForm, your organization’s requests can be submitted through simple online forms and reviewed by faculty entirely from their email. In just a few minutes, schools and universities can add approval workflows to one of JotForm’s over 400 education form templates or their own custom JotForms. Keep reading for some ideas of ways you can eliminate paperwork to save time, eliminate data re-entry, and reduce stress for students and administrators alike.
Streamline the application process
Students and administrators are all too familiar with the application process. From admissions to scholarships and grants to graduation application, applications are often a central part of the student experience. The best applications are simple to fill out and easy for your team to review.
Forms powered by Workflow for JotForm are simple to complete and enabled with an intelligent layer of approval workflows. Workflow for JotForm is perfect for admissions, scholarship, grant, and program applications. In a few clicks, you can add an approval workflow to any JotForm, like this Admissions application form or this scholarship application form.
By adding workflow to your application form, you can streamline your entire application process. Distribute your JotForm by sending out the form’s link and embedding it in your website. Once responses are submitted, your team can review them directly from email and/or Slack. Your team can view uploaded resumes and documents alongside written responses directly within their email with Workflow for JotForm.
When processing applications, the sheer volume of information your team must process can be overwhelming. Fortunately, Workflow for JotForm includes a full comment trail available to each reviewer as they process the application. This way, review boards can keep track of their thoughts as they process each application.
Eliminating paperwork in Course management
Simplify the way your organization manages courses and enrollment with Workflow for JotForm. Course management and enrollment are often characterized by manual data entry and paper forms. Moving these processes to Workflow for JotForm not only saves time and trees, it makes the end- experience for both students and reviewers more convenient and stress-free. The integration has both the flexibility to meet complex workflow requirements while remaining as simple as a couple of clicks for each approver.
Registration
Course Registrations are among the highest volume approval processes in any school or university. Easily add an approval workflow to your course registration form to process class registrations at scale. Given that some courses require prerequisites, this is the perfect opportunity to use JotForm’s conditional logic feature alongside Workflow for JotForm. This way, students will only be presented with form fields they have the permissions to view.
Drop-Add
The process of dropping or adding a course after the registration period is often complex, requiring signatures from both students and administrators. Workflow for JotForm’s multi-level functionality is perfect for this unique process. Form submissions can first be reviewed by department heads from their email addresses. Then, if approved by the department head, they can be routed automatically to the registrar’s office for final approval and documentation.
Grade Change requests
After final grades are submitted, some grades may still need to be adjusted. Frequently this approval results in mistakes made on the part of the professor or to make-up work submitted by the student after the class has finished. This process is surprisingly common but can complicate a registrar’s job. The paper processes often used by schools and universities for grade changes create a backlog for registrars during their busiest time of year. A Workflow for JotForm approval process can save time for the registrar, improve the timeliness of form submissions, and eliminate their need to re-enter data from physical grade-change forms.
Course reviews
Finally, most educational organizations complete each class with a course review. Reviews help professors and administrators understand and improve student experiences. Workflow for JotForm can help best route the flow of review information. For instance, some questions may need to be reviewed only by teachers, while others are directed towards administrators. Approval workflow messages can be customized to streamline ensure each response reaches the correct recipient. In some instances, issues should be escalated to higher level administrators. This can be achieved in a single click through Workflow for JotForm’s “reassign” feature. With Workflow for JotForm, you can easily export all course reviews along with added comments as one CSV report. Get started by adding workflow to JotForm to this course review JotForm Template.
Getting started digitizing your approval workflows
Once you’ve created digital versions of your paper forms using JotForm’s drag-and-drop form builder or a pre-made template, you can add an approval workflow by following the process described here. If you’re a user, we hope these ideas help you reduce paperwork and improve your organization in new ways. If you have yet to get started with Workflow for JotForm, you can sign up for free at www.workflowforjotform.com.
