Solution

Many of the challenges of managing an educational service come from the excessive amount of data that must be processed. Our solution addresses each of the following problems:

Basic Recordkeeping Inefficiency

Problem: In a paper based recordkeeping system many separate pieces of paper must be kept organized so that the information they contain can be found when it's needed. While possible, organizing these pieces of paper requires a lot of time and effort. Also, the information can only be used by one person at a time. In order to share information you must photocopy, fax, or scan and e-mail it. There is always the constant risk that information pulled from a file may not make it back into the file, and be forever lost.

Solution: Keeping your critical information in our system will ensure that it is secure from loss, readily accessible, and shared throughout your team. Imagine being able to access any student, instructor, or customer information in seconds, no matter where you are. Multiply that time savings by the frequency with which you need access to this data and you can see the incredible potential for saved time. It simply means that recordkeeping tasks are no longer part of your job description.

Student Progress Tracking

Problem: Many education services, especially tutoring services, face great challenges in collecting, storing, and using data regarding student activities, attendance, assessment scores, etc. For organizations who provide services across a wide geographic area these activities require a substantial effort and expense, and take a long time to result in usable information. Because this information serves as the basis for customer invoicing inefficiency in these operations can significantly impact cash flows. Also, for education services whose clients require the submission of detailed student progress information, such as NCLB SES providers, tracking and reporting on student progress can require a large expense in staff labor.

Solution: By providing instructors with a means for recording student progress information directly into our system we eliminate completely the need for your staff to do any data entry. Once information is entered by an instructor it is immediately available for reporting, invoicing, etc. No more tedious, time-consuming data entry which takes your staff away from more important activities.By providing instructors with a means for recording student progress information directly into our system we eliminate completely the need for your staff to do any data entry. Once information is entered by an instructor it is immediately available for reporting, invoicing, etc. No more tedious, time-consuming data entry which takes your staff away from more important activities. This results in a tremendous savings in time required by your staff.

Instructor Training

Problem: Every educational service faces the challenge of training instructional staff in the policies and procedures defined by the organization. The greater the staff turnover the more of a challenge this becomes. Each new staff member must be taught how to record their time, students' attendance and performance, etc. and submit this information to the organization. They must also be taught particular curriculum and instructional practices promoted by the organization. In order to do this job effectively a great deal of time must be spent training your instructors before they can even begin working.

Solution: Our solution deals with these challenges in two distinct ways. First, all processes that your instructional staff must perform to submit information to your organization have been dramatically streamlined. Although they will still be submitting the same amount of information as you currently require, the process of recording the information in our simple and intuitive online forms takes far less time and requires a great deal less training. In fact, we have already provided instructional information on how to use each screen in our application. This leaves you to focus your training on the important aspects of your policy and procedures. Second, by posting your important policy and procedure documents online in our system you are assured that all of your instructors will have ready access to this important information.

Communications

Problem: Every day the staff of an education service spends a great deal of time merely communicating with the instructors. They may spend hours calling or e-mailing every instructor at a particular school, or in a particular school district. They may engage in days-long phone tag matches to resolve a simple issue. Complicating matters further, many instructors don't have reliable access to e-mail, especially in rural areas. Every time your staff spends a significant amount of time communicating with your instructors it is costing the organization time and money.

Solution: Our Communications module directly addresses these issues by providing a streamlined communication system directly within the application. Staff can send messages to any instructor which they will receive the next time they login. They can even send messages to groups of instructors that meet certain criteria, or set up reoccurring reminder messages. Copies of these messages can also be sent by e-mail if so desired. Instructors can ask questions of the staff and receive their answer from within the application. Questions that are often asked by instructors can be added to the Frequently Asked Questions list thereby saving all the time required to answer the same question repeatedly. All of these features add up to a huge time savings.

Resource Scheduling

Problem: Education services which provide their clients with facilities for computer-based learning or test taking, meeting rooms, or other valuable and limited resources must either maintain a enough of these resources that there is never a conflict, or they must expend effort to carefully schedule the resources. These tasks become even more complicated if the education service bills their clients for the use of these resources. Maintaining all the information these resources require can quickly become oppressive.

Solution: Our Resource Scheduling module provides powerful and flexible tools for effectively scheduling, and billing for, the use of your limited resources. With robust features for scheduling resources, recording when they're checked out and checked in, and including any charges on client invoices this module eliminates the problems you face managing your resources.

Architecture

Our solution is designed to maximize ease-of-use, reliability, availality, and security, while minimizing the amount of effort for initial deployment in your organization. We have achieved this through a secure data-driven web-based application architecture called "Software-as-a-Service", or SaaS. This means we provide access to the software in much the same way that a utility company provides access to electricity or water. We handle all of the technical aspects of hosting and maintaining the system so you don't have to worry about it. There is nothing to install or maintain on your end. All you need is an internet connection and a browser.

No matter where you are, as long as you have an internet connetion, you will be able to manage your organization.

Technologies

Usability

Our application is designed to look like and feel as responsive as a desktop application. You may have noticed that web applications are always making you wait while information passes back and forth between your computer and a web server. This can be really annoying when the whole screen goes away completely every time you click on something. We have eliminated those problems using an exciting new technology called AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML). What does that mean? Simply put it means that our application performs better and faster than other web applications. That means you spend less time waiting for the computer and more time being productive.

Hosting

Our solutions are hosted on the most reliable infrastructure in the world. While we could cut corners on hosting we thought you'd like the assurance that your portal will be up and running at all times. That's why we chose the most reliable and scalable hosting solution available, the Rackspace Cloud.

Browsers

EliteSES has been fully tested on Internet Explorer and Firefox, the two most popular browsers. All features of our software are guaranteed to be compatible with these two browsers and we will provide customer support for users of these browsers. We have also tested with Safari, Google Chrome (beta), and Opera, and while we believe that all features are functional on these browsers there may be some cosmetic issues.

Platforms

Because this is a browser-based application it is less important what operating system platform you use than it is for desktop software, however, just to be sure we have tested EliteSES using the following platforms: Microsoft Windows (Vista 32 and 64-bit versions, XP, 2000 Professional), Apple Macintosh OS X, and two Linux distros (Fedora Core 10 and Ubuntu 8).

Security

All communications between users' computers and our servers are encrypted to ensure your private date is protected at all times. You can rest assured that your data will be save while in our hands.

All of the data stored on our servers is backed up nightly to eliminate the potential for a catastrophic loss of data.