Most management systems you can get for your RTO focus on AVETMISS and Funding Claim Reporting. For as many as 90% of RTOs, AVETMISS reporting, annually is all they are focused on. These reports are a cornerstone commitment for every RTO and without it you’re toast! But is this functionality enough to safeguard your business well into the future? It’s really just the tip of the compliance Iceberg. It’s all the regulatory body sees, until such time as they conduct an audit.
For many RTO’s an audit could mean having the business that took them years to build up, being just wiped away with the stroke of a bureaucratic pen. Because many of the other tasks required to maintain compliance and not being properly done…
Yes, on the surface everything seems to be OK, but what is an audit going to uncover? The Standards covering RTO’s are very complex and they are often just a ‘little bit’ subjective as anyone who’s been through an audit will tell you. The bottom line, no matter how hard you try, it’s always possible that something is slipping between the cracks in your organisation.
Probably the worst kept secret in the industry is that the national regulator believes there are too many training organisations in the market and anecdotally is seeking to reduce them by 20 – 25%. That means around a thousand organisations have to go. So unless you want to be in that ‘Hit-list-1,000’, you’d better be watching your compliance like a hawk. And it doesn’t begin and end with AVETMISS reporting, funding claims and documentation either. These are just the start of maintaining health compliance ecosystem.
Can you completely trust your Student Management System?
There is always that lingering doubt in the back of your mind about your student management system. Is it being kept up-to-date withAVETMISS reporting requirements? Is it enabling staff to keep up with all the correct information or are there gaps in reporting?
Does it automate the process for student records to be kept up-to-date, or is this something your staff have to remember to do?
With at 39 different training management systems on the market, it’s difficult to know which one you can trust. But regardless of which system you use, here is a question you should be asking: How cleverly is my system utilising the data being collected? Is it simply using it for AVETMISS Reporting, or is the system helping me properly run my RTO?
Here’s an example:
A student with a hearing disability books a training session at your facilities – completed a registration form, registers online or phones in to book. He or she submits that information and it’s recorded for AVETMISS Reporting, but that’s all your student management system does. Your staff then have to extract that information from the system and then use it to ensure this student has special assistance needed to successfully complete the course.
However, your staff fail to identify this information, just going about their daily business and don’t prepare for this student. Not really their fault, there is nothing in the system to alert them to this information, it is just there with all the other data.
The student has difficulty completing the course and complains to the national regulator, triggering an almost immediate audit or your RTO, which uncovers a number of irregularities, that could be enough to disqualify you from operating or “best case scenario” it costs thousands in fees and lost opportunities, including over $200+/hour for the auditor! Rapidfire rectification may not be so bad but a Regulatory Decision on the TGA website is a very public problem.
This ‘Collect & Forget’ philosophy is the problem with most systems on the market. The data is collected and AVETMISS validation is completed, but that is as far as it goes – the data is dumped in a database, hidden behind a menu item or two and forgotten. Aside from checking every entry being very labor intensive (and expensive) this also invites human error, which in turn invites compliance problems.
A Student Management System with AI?
When innovation is in your DNA, you can’t rest on your laurels and say “That’s good enough” and that’s probably the biggest difference between JWGecko and the rest of the field. We are passionate about what we do and it has resulted in AI being used throughout our student management system.
With our systems, the data is not just used for AVETMISS reporting, it is brought to life. For example:
- Once the special assistance box is ticked on an enrolment form, an email is sent immediately to the Learning Support people within the RTO.
- A confirmation of special dietary requirements would trigger the same response.
- An underage student can be prompted to upload parents consent.
- After 6 months, the system will prompt students to update their address, to ensure that information is always kept up-to-date.
- Once fully automated, every aspect of the student journey is automatically recorded.
- Our assessment mapping tool links directly to your online learning content.
- The system chases students for missing AVETMISS data automatically, according to your rules.
- Dashboards give a constant indication of how much AVETMISS data is missing or “Not Stated” so you can fix any systemic problems early.
- Our training.gov.au monitoring system tells you about changes to components in your scope… and even alerts you to what your competitors in the same space are up to!
- And much more.
With over 15 years of continuous experience supporting the VET sector, we know how things really work in practice… and how they can go wrong. By utilising smart systems to automate many of the processes that the regulators expect humans to do (but are often forgotten), Gecko Learning products save you time and money and could ultimately one day save your RTO!
