Case Studies

St. Mary's College, University of Melbourne

One of the greatest challenges for the Dean of Studies at St. Mary's is juggling the large timetable at the beginning of each semester, ensuring minimal or no tutorial clashes for their 100+ participating students.  This time-consuming task is made much simpler and faster with Scribe, as the information is in one repository and effective reports can be generated to highlight clashes.

Ensuring tutors completed their sesson attendance sheets and notes on student participation in a timely manner was a long-standing issue. Scribe allows the Dean to quickly and easily see which tutors are late in completing their sessions, and chase them up.  This ensures the attendance records are accurate and notes on students' absence and performance in the session are taken and recorded.  This has added value to the academic programme offered by St. Mary's – with Scribe, both tutors and students are more accountable and greater (and higher quality!) information is reaching the Dean faster.

Newman College, University of Melbourne

As a College which takes tutorial attendance very seriously, seeing its academic programme as its most significant feature, Newman is delighted with the efficiency of the Scribe. It means that students are instantly made aware that attention is being paid to them academically. It means that when they miss a session there is feedback and accountability. This is very different from the system at the University where student absence appears not to be noted at all. So Scribe helps bridge this highly important transition stage of their education.

The immediacy of the feedback means that all kinds of issues are quickly brought to the attention of the Dean; issues of health, of panic studying and also simply of lack of balance and poor academic routine. The existence of Scribe allows the Dean to spend time more constructively; in discussion with students for example. That there is a graded system of seriousness in email messages is helpful and does make it clear to students that they cannot afford to miss academic opportunities. Interestingly, there is a very significant body of research emerging from the UK at the moment which points to the fact that Lecture and Tutorial attendance is THE significant indicator of academic success.

There is no doubt that a very significant amount of time, previously used on fairly humdrum checking up, is now saved through Scribe. It means that the Tutorial programme is shaped in an utterly professional and serious way.This all makes a huge difference.

Sharing space is so much easier...

Another benefit enjoyed by the Deans of St. Mary's and Newman College, and the Manager of the Academic Centre, is the ease at which shared rooms are now allocated and booked.  Currently some resources are shared between St.Mary's College and Newman College, many of the rooms in the Academic Centre in between the two colleges.  Previously, co-ordinating changes across the three organisations was time-consuming, confusing and open to a lot of clashes.  With Scribe, room allocation changes are notified to the affected stakeholder(s) immediately, so door signs can be re-printed and timetables reissued where appropriate.