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TokAM - Case Studies and Quotes
Tokairo Attendance Manager (TokAM)
is used by over 70 FE colleges across the UK.
Latest TokAM case study
Improving control and cashflow: how TokAM is paying dividends at Stevenson College Edinburgh
Stevenson College Edinburgh - www.stevenson.ac.uk - is the fifth largest college in Scotland and one of the largest further education institutions in the country. It has over 15,000 students, including more than 2,000 full-time, taking a wide range of courses from accounting to social care – and everything in between.
Stevenson College Edinburgh (SCE) has a strong reputation for access to higher education and widening participation, with a third of students studying at Higher National Certificate or professional levels. Building on its reputation for inclusiveness, the College was chosen to host the BRITE (Beattie Resources for Inclusiveness in Technology and Education) Initiative - www.brite.ac.uk. This national centre is the realisation of one of the main recommendations of the Beattie Report - www.scotland.gov.uk - and serves the FE sector throughout Scotland.
 Full-time, part-time, evening, open and distance-learning courses are geared to a variety of levels from Access to HND. In addition to an academic body of 350 lecturers, there are a further 200 support staff. Annual turnover is around £20 million meaning that the financial discipline and business processes essential in corporate business are just as necessary on campus. With funding closely linked to student outcome and attendance, monitoring and managing attendance is crucial.
"Student attendance monitoring has always been an important issue.” says SCE business process manager Ronnie Peacock. “Often a requirement for student funding, it is essential that we have the facts and figures at our fingertips. Student dropout is a potential waste of both College resources and the students' investment in learning, and spotting the early signs of irregular attendance is a sure way of addressing these issues.”
"We had been aware of the need to improve the process for some time, but what finally prompted us to act was the introduction of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) – www.emascotland.com." EMAs are being rolled out across Scotland to provide financial support to young people from low-income families, and by 2007-08, all eligible 16 to 19 year olds who undertake a full-time course at school or college will receive an EMA.”
 "We are now able to provide fully audited records on a weekly basis. Whereas our previous process of monitoring attendance was just not good enough, TokAM was straightforward to implement, easy to use, is robust and provides all the information we need to satisfy the EMA audit requirements, as well as enabling us to get a firm grip on attendance for our own internal management.”
"We had utilised a reactive system of attendance monitoring, where we applied funds unless we had received data from tutors to indicate otherwise. Essentially, it was too ad hoc and there were difficulties in confirming records or extracting information for analysis that would help identify problem areas. Now, the situation is reversed, where the Student Support section identifies students who will not be paid unless the tutors report successful intervention and guidance. As a result, we are more proactive in the use of attendance data for student guidance and for fund payments.”
";TokAM has provided much better financial control in administering bursary and hardship funds, which are also attendance-based, and has had a major impact on cash flow control. Over the first six months we had cash flow improvements of around £60,000. All the saved cash goes back into student retention systems and focuses the money where it is needed most – to students who need it and who want to attend. At more than one level, TokAM has paid for itself in the first 12 months of use."
Why Tokairo’s TokAM system? “My previous job was information systems manager at another Scottish further education institute, where I had selected the system from a number of alternative options and successfully piloted it in a campus of over 4000 students. On the basis of that experience we identified it as the best solution and chose it for Stevenson College Edinburgh."
TokAM enforces tight security and accuracy when attendance data is entered and offers a wide range of register capture methods - for example, paper-based registers using OCR techniques, direct data entry for tutors’ networked laptops and Web registers where attendance data can be entered over the Internet of a college Intranet.
"At SCE, our former system used an ineffective and centralised scan and data entry system. Every register had to be physically transported from locations throughout the college to the scanning office, scanned and then returned. This was time-consuming – and there was the risk of losing the registers. Now, we make use of existing networked scanners and photocopiers. A paper register never has to leave the originating faculty office and the whole process of printing and distributing registers is done locally. A particular feature we like is the fact that TokAM doesn’t reject scanned pages where, previously, we often had to reprocess input." The system tightly integrates with all the different college systems, including SITS, Unit-e, Fretwell-Downing EBS, MicroCompass QLS, Eclipse, Campus IT and Mondas. Features include highly efficient data capture and ability to quickly report on attendance which enables colleges to proactively support their students.
 "Our own design for importing student, subject and timetable data between our Student Records systems (SITS\Dolphin) and TokAM has also been a great success. We now import strangers and withdrawals to Dolphin, re-exporting them to clear the strangers list and removing the need for separate operational routines. We have been able to quickly identify students who are attending classes but have not yet completed the enrolment process as well as providing reports to course leaders on enrolled students who do not appear on any registers.”
"We had also used automated routines in our student records system [SITS \ Dolphin] to transfer data to our subject registration and resulting processes. This caused problems with duplicate registrations and had difficulties in situations where students received integrated learning, over multiple subjects, in the same class. Now, we have closed that interface and, instead, run prepared reports from TokAM that are checked and verified by tutors themselves, providing much cleaner and more accurate data for our own use and, importantly, for certificate-awarding bodies."
Widely used by colleges throughout the UK, TokAM’s reporting addresses the increasing demands from tutors, sponsors and the Government who request monthly, weekly, even daily attendance data and reports. It is the least expensive and most flexible system available for efficiently capturing attendance data and quickly responds to and delivers all Government, LSC, college management, administration and tutor report demands. Flexible reporting can be configured using a wide range of criteria and reports can be saved for re-use and even shared with other users. There is also full compliance with the Freedom of Information and Data Protection acts using the TokAM DM Integration Module and TokOpen document management system.
"We piloted it in June last year and it has been running for the whole of this academic year. Support from Tokairo has always been fast and effective and introducing the system to college staff has been straightforward. For example, there’s a one-hour in-house training session [for the reporting module] before we let staff loose on it for real.So far about half of all academic and support staff have been covered this way.”
"The TokAM Reporting Module is now distributed on every desktop, guidance tutors have full access to reports and can even see individual register images, replicas of the register taken on the day. We now get very fast turnaround of attendance data from paper to desktop, comprehensive information on room utilisation and, because it is extremely guidance-oriented, we can get the data to the relevant tutors much more quickly.”
“I’ve had very positive feedback from the use of the system - from teaching staff to senior management and I’ve been able to show excellent cash flow control in bursaries and other funds that utilise attendance data. Any teething problems have all had to do with operational issues rather than anything to do with the actual software. The system enables us to dig deeper into the bald statistics and has resulted in a number of positive changes to our operating procedures, including subject registration and student retention.”
“All in all, my expectations of the system were certainly met and those of others in the College exceeded. The bottom line is that, from individual attendances to full college statistics, we have better information for student tutors and counsellors, better and more accurate data for financial and payment systems, and better management information. The benefits flow throughout the whole monitoring and management processes."
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