How No-Code Bridges the Digital Talent Gap in Academic Institutions

With the demand for business applications growing at a rapid pace, new development projects continue to pile up in academic institutions. However, budget constraints, lack of IT resources and other organizational issues often derail schools and universities from reaching their full digital potential.

Amid these challenges, more and more institutions are turning to no-code technology to adapt to the digital world.

Learn how you can create custom cloud applications for your academic institution using no-code development.

Digitization Challenges Among Academic Institutions

The industry is at a difficult point where the needs of its community – students, faculty members and stakeholders – have long outgrown and outpaced its abilities to meet them. Outside of academia, digital tools have replaced many traditional systems and processes, but numerous institutions are having a hard time fully migrating their processes to the cloud.

One of the biggest reasons is understaffed and overburdened IT departments.

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated old challenges and heaped on new ones. Aside from causing admission rates to drop off a cliff, lockdowns exposed longstanding weaknesses in the sector’s digital infrastructure.

For instance, cybersecurity has become an even bigger headache in the new age of virtual and hybrid learning. IT departments are forced to put out fires instead of progressing with digital transformation efforts. In 2022 alone, nearly 3,000 cyberattacks were recorded weekly against educational organizations. As a result, IT experts had to work double-time, and universities bled millions of dollars recovering from these attacks.

WEATHERING THE SHIFT: From developing new software to dealing with cybersecurity issues, IT workers in the education industry are among the most overworked during and after the pandemic.

With a huge portion of tech experts managing more critical projects than usual, the rest of the institution is left with little to no IT support for their digital needs. The education sector needed to empower its non-IT community in other ways – by upskilling its members and equipping them with the right digital tools.

Why Academic Institutions Turn to No-Code Development

Educational organizations are realizing the benefits of no-code development in meeting those needs.

No-code offers a visual development approach where users can build custom apps using point-and-click and drag-and-drop tools. It doesn’t require extensive, line-by-line coding, which helps accelerate the entire development process. As a result, even business users with little to no programming background can create fully functional apps that meet their exact requirements.

Schools and universities with limited IT resources use no-code to empower those closest to the problem to build their own solutions. Combining their no-code skills with their in-depth knowledge of specific institutional workflows, school administrators, teachers, admissions professionals and even counselors gain the ability to build applications that meet their unique needs — without relying heavily on IT.

LEARN FAST: No-code enables the people closest to the problem to build the software and functionality they need, without waiting on IT experts.

Benefits of Using Caspio’s No-Code Platform

Caspio is the world’s leading no-code platform for building custom, feature-rich business applications. With its intuitive interface, built-in cloud database, enterprise-grade security and flexible deployment methods, academic institutions can create tools that help them digitize student and faculty experiences, administrative operations, and other business areas.

Here are some of the reasons why Caspio is the no-code tool for you:

Cut Development Costs

Traditionally, development projects are complicated, expensive and time-consuming. You need a team of programmers to be able to create unique applications that cater to your exact requirements, which is a major reason for high development costs. On the contrary, Caspio is a proven application development platform that reduces the time-to-market and cuts huge programming costs to a flexible monthly subscription.

Southern California School of Interpretation, a school specializing in preparing Spanish and English bilingual students to become certified interpreters, used Caspio to build its training portal for market expansion. After six months of working and failing to complete the project with expensive third-party developers, the school took a leap of faith. They invested in Caspio and decided to build the solution on their own.

Using the no-code platform and relying on their innate knowledge of the requirements, the team launched their custom training portal in just 30 days, saving time and thousands of dollars in overhead, development and maintenance costs. Within the first year, the program grew by 120%.

“I didn’t have the tools initially. Caspio brought an incredible number of tools for me, enabling me to actually put what I had in my mind and put it on the system,” Director Nestor Wagner said.

Meet Strict Compliance Requirements 

FERPA is a federal law that provides parents and students with the right to access education records, request updates and gain control over the information disclosure to third-party bodies. Academic institutions, such as schools, universities, state colleges and education agencies, must comply with FERPA to avoid sanctions, including the withdrawal of government funds from their organization.

To help these institutions protect the privacy and integrity of student education records at all levels, Caspio’s no-code platform comes with built-in FERPA compliance. So, whether you’re creating a student database, an enrollment portal or a survey form, you can rest easy knowing Caspio powers the apps you need while ensuring comprehensive security and compliance.

Unify Scattered Data and Workflows

Using Caspio, academic institutions can build powerful applications that reflect data in real-time. This is particularly important for large organizations with numerous departments and offices. Because Caspio is based on the cloud, every change you make in your online databases will show instantaneously, avoiding errors commonly caused by manual data input.

Barnes & Noble College’s inventory department needed a digital solution to streamline the inventory management of 750 stores. After comparing multiple app development platforms, Barnes & Noble College ultimately used Caspio to build and deploy custom databases to unify data across all store locations. They have since improved their overall data accuracy, tightened inventory controls, and reduced processing times by as much as 50%.

“Caspio allows ordinary people to do extraordinary things; it has been transformational for our organization.”

Troy Wesselius
Operational Controller
Barnes & Noble College

Improve Scalability

In a traditional programming environment, IT managers need to build an infrastructure that can withstand the highest point of usage to be able to deliver at peak times. In contrast, Caspio allows for on-demand scalability for peak times or sustained periods, allowing your applications to perform as needed even when there’s heavy usage, for example, during enrollment or the start of classes.

5 No-Code App Inspirations for Your Institution

Here are five use cases you can implement to make the most out of Caspio’s no-code platform and embrace digitization within your academic institution:

1. Build a Faculty Portal

Digital faculty portals automate the tedious, manual process of admin work. Use Caspio to build a centralized portal for staff to access resources and perform their due diligence. Upload class schedules and academic calendars for easy reference. Digitize paperwork and manual administrative tasks to improve efficiency, freeing up instructors’ time to focus on their academic plans. Most importantly, capture all faculty information into a single, readily accessible database to ensure necessary details are within their reach at all times.

ONE-STOP SOURCE: Keep all your important files and information in a unified portal.

2. Launch a Secure Student Database

Enhance the student experience by creating a secure, unified student database system. With this, students can access all their information in a single portal – from their grades, class schedules, assignment submissions and more. You can also enable automated SMS or email reminders to students about their classes and deliverables. Keep the database secure by providing specific permission levels to access and edit data.

3. Digitize Paper Forms

Paperwork errors are notoriously expensive – and unfortunately common. _­­­­­Automating forms and digitizing the review process reduces these errors, speeds up paperwork processes and optimizes the school’s ability to gather important data and draw actionable plans from them.

From digitizing student registrations and organizational surveys to creating online leave forms for faculty members, Caspio can help your institution go paperless. Use Caspio’s data visualization features to automatically process and display data in graphs or charts to support your decision-making.

Collin College, a community college in North Texas, used a lot of paper forms in their workflows. After realizing that paper-based processes are limiting their capabilities and causing more harm than good, they looked for a solution that could digitize their error-prone, outdated forms. The school used Caspio to create several online submission forms that they embedded on their website, ultimately streamlining their workflows and saving them a lot of time and stress in the process.

4. Create an Event Calendar

Caspio allows you to build a custom calendar that displays upcoming school events, such as student orientations, sports fests, field trips, club meetings, volunteer activities and more. Organize them in a weekly or monthly layout to make each event easier to view. You can also add a field for notes or reminders for every activity, which are accessible to organizers and faculty members.

SAVE THE DATE: Never miss a campus activity with an event calendar embedded on your website.

5. Streamline Facilities Management

Keep track of all your school facilities and equipment in one location. Use Caspio to build a facilities management system that empowers officials to monitor campus assets, their audit history and persons in charge to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. Implement scheduled reminders to ensure regular maintenance of these facilities and publish safety guides and manuals for easy reference.

DOCUMENTED: Enhance inventory management in your organization with a secure database that tracks the status of valuable assets and facilities.

Georgia College is a public liberal arts university based in Milledgeville, Georgia. They have been providing chartering services since 2009 to assist athletes, students and faculty members with transportation. After experiencing a 15% to 20% year-on-year growth in trip requests, their initial system became increasingly inadequate to handle the demands.

Using Caspio, they built an entirely cloud-based management system that helped enhance their transportation schedules. Since then, they have included more services in their portal, including parking services, vehicle and driver scheduling and vehicle maintenance options.

“We like the ease-of-use and reliability of Caspio and the fact that we can easily make changes to an application at any time,” said Ryan Greene, parking and transportation senior manager at Georgia College. “The new system also made our internal processes more efficient, allowing departments to take on more requests with fewer additional costs.”

Nurture a New Generation of Learners With Caspio

To thrive in today’s digital world, academic institutions must adopt new technologies and bid goodbye to slow, outdated systems. However, limited IT budgets and resources keep them from creating cloud applications based on their needs.

Caspio empowers educational organizations to take their next step toward digital transformation. With Caspio’s no-code platform, you can improve your operations and deliver more quality services to students, faculty members and stakeholders.

Schedule a free consultation with our experts and experience the transformative power of Caspio today.