Incept x University of the Sunshine Coast

Between November 2023 and April 2024, after being successfully selected through a rigorous procurement process undertaken by the University of the Sunshine Coast (UniSC), Antero embarked on a collaborative venture to integrate its Incept platform into the university’s academic administration systems, specifically focusing on academic credit management (course credit precedents) and student onboarding processes (workflow automation). The Incept platform, well known for its robust workflow management capabilities, promised to revolutionise how UniSC managed faculty workflows, course credit decisioning, and back-office administration.

Challenge

UniSC faced challenges managing student enrolments and credit transfers, especially during peak enrolment periods. The university’s existing manual processes were time-consuming, sometimes taking weeks to complete given the complexity of student histories and alignment to course requirements, and didn’t provide the student an automated system to review their academic credit transfer possibilities.

This was particularly complex when coordinating credit decisions between administrative staff and academics across multiple university faculties, each with its unique procedures and requirements. This meant during peak enrolment periods it was possible for enrolment processing wait times to be further extended, due to significant bottlenecks created within the university as a result of the manual overhead involved.

Solution

The Incept platform, with its richly featured workflow management tool, was tailored for UniSC’s systems and processes to address these challenges. Collaborating on an higher education focused workflow, Incept was able to show seamless straight-through processing capabilities and meticulously crafted workflows offered a promising solution to expedite student onboarding and academic credit management.

The platform’s ability to automate data capture from students and streamline management workflows promised to significantly help the students in understanding their academic credit pathways, reduce the processing time previously required by manual procedures, and even provide complete automation and straight through processing.

The workflow sequence was tailored to UniSC’s requirements for controlled handover between administrative and academic staff within the faculties to provide guidance around individual complex course level credit decisions and facilitate faster application processing times.

Through importing historical academic precedent decisions into a consistent format and providing a structured and auditable interface to add and maintain precedents Incept provided the ability to automatically evaluate precedent decisions.

The Incept decision engine, with a direct connection to our unique precedent database, was able to systematically evaluate precedents and return a result with consideration to type of match, awarded credit type and precedent validity and prepare credit records for ingestion directly into the student management system.

A credit calculator directly referencing the precedent database for use by current and prospective students was implemented so students could check possible credit eligibility based on their intended study and previously completed learning – all without having to submit an application or enrolment request.

Conclusion

The project highlighted the transformative potential of using Incept to provide advanced workflow management solutions in academic administration. This collaboration between Antero and UniSC demonstrated Incept’s capability to provide innovative approaches to addressing longstanding challenges in academic credit management and student onboarding processes.

FROM OUR FOUNDER

“Witnessing the collaboration between Antero and the UniSC team unfold was nothing short of incredible. In a short space of time the teams were able to spin up a platform that had the potential to improve processing time by orders of magnitude. Even given a challenging IT environment, Incept shines as the most user-friendly and highly powered origination + onboarding solution on the market today.”