RCSI: Reforming education through low-code

The company

The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland - Bahrain is a constituent university of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, which was established in 1784. Like its Dublin counterpart situated on St. Stephen's Green, RCSI Bahrain is a not-for-profit health sciences institution focused on education and research. The university incorporates schools of medicine, nursing, and postgraduate studies and research, and thus provides both undergraduate and postgraduate levels of education and research activities in many healthcare fields.

Currently the university has a cohort of 1,300+ students from 40+ different countries, and is considered to be one of the top medical universities in the Middle East.

The challenge

The university maintained a substantial amount of data for students, staff, and alumni, and the majority of that data was held on spreadsheets. This led to a considerable amount of difficulty, as the spreadsheets were kept on shared drives within the university, and could not be accessed from offsite locations.

The quality of the data was also poor, as they were all manually entered, resulting in many user-entry errors that went undetected.

The administration required a management information system (MIS) that had full visibility of the activities within the university.

The major challenges they faced were:

• Difficulty in creating and maintaining data
• Multiple users accessing the spreadsheets
• High time-consumption
• Manual errors

The university administration handled extensive records and couldn't afford any mistakes to occur. Multiple spreadsheets also proved to be considerably difficult to keep track of, and for a large university like RCSI, it became essential for them to hunt for a flexible tool that filled all their requirements.

The solution

We spoke to Mr. Simon Whitebridge, a consultant working on the university's strategic plan to implement a new MIS for better efficiency and savings. He told us how RCSI was introduced to Zoho Creator and how it quickly aided them.

The staff at RCSI were looking for an HRMS system when they came across Zoho People. The university found Zoho People handy, and other Zoho products were investigated and taken on board (Zoho Recruit, Zoho Projects, Zoho Analytics, and Zoho Creator).

A key part of the university is their rigorous admission process. The team goes through thousands of applications every year, and only admits about 250 students. All this was done by hand and resulted in weeks of manual effort for administrative staff.

Benefits and ROI

"We realized the benefits mostly in cost savings and efficiency in our manual processes, so we can spend more time improving the quality of teaching and student experience."

And the significance it had on RCSI?

The impact on RCSI Bahrain has been huge. After the initial few applications were developed in 2017, and the benefits of Zoho Creator were realized, virtually every department in the university requested an application to be developed for them.

"As of January 2020, there are approximately 50 Zoho Creator applications at RCSI Bahrain."

He tells us that the university has gone from spreadsheets to workflows, resulting in smoother data input.

"Using workflows meant that the quality of our data got much better. No mistakes are made now, because we have the necessary checks to actually reject wrongly input data. When we were using spreadsheets, the number of typos was just huge."

Creator's cloud-based feature is something Mr. Whitebridge highlights:

"Access to the system is much better, because it's cloud-based. Previously, all the data was held on shared files, which couldn't be accessed externally. Now, because of Creator, you can log in globally and access the university's data. Plus, you can have multiple users logged in simultaneously, all able to utilize the system."

An array of applications ( Visual representation)

Some of the more prominent applications used by the institute included:

• Research & Audit Management System
• Careers & Alumni System
• Admissions System for Medical Students
• Admissions System for BSc Nursing Students
• Admissions System for MSc Nursing Students
• Student Experience Survey
• Facilities Management System
• Exam Questions Change Management System
• Examiner Booking System
• Graduation Event Booking System
• Clubs/Societies Registration System
• Halls of Residence Registration System
• Roommate Registration System
• Exam Attendance System
• Student Laptop Repair System
• Exam Timetabling System
• Student Events Diary

Overcoming the challenges

The main problems facing the university were resolved:

• Access:Zoho Creator is a cloud-based system and can be accessed anywhere, providing you have an internet connection. All users are able to access data without hassle.
• Data quality: With built-in controls around data types—date formats, email addresses, phone numbers, and more—and the additional validation that can be created via workflow and Deluge, their data quality is now far better. Any manual errors or lost data have been eliminated.
• MIS: RCSI Bahrain has now developed complex dashboards that use data from one or more of their Zoho Creator applications. The fact that these dashboards can be published externally, and the data is updated in real time, is a huge bonus and means that up-to-date reports are always available.

Another main impact has been in operational efficiency. Fewer labor hours are spent in processing data and producing management-level reports. According to Mr. Whitebridge, since there's a "single source of data that can be shared by all RCSI departments," there's much less data duplication.