Starting a private school was much different from starting a regular startup or an IT company, which was the case with my previous business endeavors. Owning and running an eLearning design and development company was a challenge. Still, with so many useful web solutions and people knowing how to use them, it wasn't that difficult to optimize our business processes and bring our company to the next level.
With the school, the challenge was to educate employees that aren't as tech-savvy as employees from an IT company to use those tools. This meant that we had to find a way to integrate technology in an environment that traditionally doesn't rely on web solutions in order to organize, optimize and function on a day-to-day basis.
Less micromanagement, more self-improvement!
Managing internal tasks and responsibilities and tracking statuses became much easier with ActiveCollab. Running a school in Serbia means a lot of paperwork, administration work, and having different teams of teachers create various reports throughout the year. ActiveCollab makes organizing those responsibilities much easier and allows us to spend less time on micromanagement. Instead, we spend more time maintaining and improving what is most important to us - providing high-quality education for our students and educating our teachers to become better every day.
ActiveCollab covers the process of providing documentation, tracking the progress of ongoing tasks, managing procurement, teacher's documentation, student opinions, etc. Even though it helped us with everyday operations, we benefited the most from ongoing and recurring tasks. It was a challenge to put teachers into such a mindset (of reminding oneself in the future that something will have to be done without clear instructions from the management). But once we achieved that, it was a lot easier for us since we had more organized teachers.
Without ActiveCollab, we would have to track most of our work manually, which wouldn't leave us much time for dealing with other important segments of running a private school. Some of the most important things that need to be managed efficiently are curriculum management, student management, teaching management, and marketing. Since we started handling internal operations with ActiveCollab, we have had more time to deal with the mentioned segments of our business, and that is where this tool helped us the most.
Our internal operations, processes, and tasks are easier to track and manage. Most importantly, it was clearer for our teachers what is essential in every internal task. Another feature that was useful to us was the history of changes. Our teachers sometimes need to have insights into previous task changes to provide corresponding insights and make the right decisions in dealing with our students. We pretty much rely on ActiveCollab as an online student record.
Becoming the best with ActiveCollab
As educators and education managers, we're dreaming of a day when the amount of time spent dealing with paperwork will be reduced to a minimum. The majority of our time will be spent making our school the best possible place for education, making its teachers and students the best versions of themselves.
We believe that ActiveCollab's new features will impact the way we as an institution function and allow us to achieve our goal of becoming one of the best private schools in the region.
