How IT can solve the problem of paper when college goes virtual

Long before COVID-19 concerns impacted learning at all levels, academic institutions faced a significant task of managing the records of thousands of past and current students. This process requires complex, integrated systems and well-established processes.

Applications, identity documents, registration forms, qualifications, test results and handwritten notes must be sorted and stored, yet easily accessible to share between departments or with a third-party. Before lockdowns and distance learning became the norm, digitizing documents and bringing these processes under control was a future goal for administrators. Now, moving everything online is a requirement.

Making it easy—and cost effective—to go virtual

Whether your organization looks forward to starting this new school year on campus or continue e-learning, you’ll need to process everything from student admissions to class assignments more efficiently. IT departments like yours can come to the rescue. Offer your school administrators scanners that can speed up the process of student on-boarding, including integrating with records management systems. Document scanners can provide a quick and easy way to digitize, organize and share documents across the higher education environment.

You’ll help your organization save time, paper and space by providing a way to bring online so many types of paperwork, including:

  • Student admissions forms
  • Transcripts
  • Student identification documents
  • Proof-of-nationality documents
  • Loan applications
  • Course syllabuses

Facilitating enrollment and transfers

Student enrollment and transfers are traditionally especially paper-intensive. Schools your organization interfaces with may use a variety of file formats and everyone must follow requirements for protecting personal information during enrollment and registration. Digitizing and automating the processing can ensure timely results with none of the hassles associated with replacing lost paper records and identification. Deploying a document scanning solution can offer registrars an easy and efficient way to manage and share enrollment and financial aid documents.

Extending the benefits across the organization

Registration and admissions are not the only departments that can benefit from imaging solutions. By implementing scanners throughout the organization, you can make it easy to share documents between and among student services, admissions and financial aid. You’ll want to carefully consider which scanner model or models will meet the needs of your particular environment.

  • Is it easy to use? Today’s document scanning solutions make it easy for administrators unfamiliar with scanners to implement and begin scanning without IT resources.
  • Does it produce crisp documents and clean images? Illegible or fuzzy captures of documents will hold up processes and can create room for error.
  • Can it compress files? This makes it easier to share via email and takes up less storage space.
  • Can it handle the types of documents that need digitizing? For example, passports and other identification documents can be challenging to put through copy or scanning machines that are built for standard paper.

High quality, affordable scanning for on campus or remote scanning needs

As an IT professional, you know any hardware you deploy will impact the daily work life of your colleagues, faculty and the students they serve. You can feel confident choosing fi Series document scanners, because they offer superior feeding performance and industry-leading image quality, which leads to more accurate data and faster application processing. To meet the unique needs of colleges and universities, we recommend the fi-800R and fi-7300NX.

For registration: fi-800R

Admissions or registrar offices benefit from the fi-800R, a hard-working scanner that’s built for easy passport, hard card and ID scanning. It’s ideal for small spaces—just half the size of other scanners in its category. This one is perfect for reception areas, registration kiosks and busy admissions offices. It can also handle larger batches and features an automatic document feeder tray that holds 20 sheets at a time.

For distributed scanning: fi-7300NX

This modern scanner model works well in distributed locations. With Wi-Fi capability, teachers and administrators can quickly scan from one location to another, no PC required. It comes with a large touchscreen with user-defined job buttons, plus user authentication, to ensure privacy and security. This scanner is fast—up to 60 pages per minute!—and has the flexibility to scan various document sizes and thickness in a single batch.

In addition, both models come with the popular PaperStream Capture Software, an advanced imaging application for accurate optical character recognition. The software can be used to clean up scanned images and automate tagging, file naming and workflow.

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