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Case study

Manipal Academy of Higher Education

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About MAHE

Established in 1953, Manipal Academy of

Higher Education (‘MAHE’), formerly known as

Manipal University is the first private, non-profit,

institution to become a “deemed University”

offering programmes in undergraduate, graduate

and doctoral studies.

Established in 2013, the Office of International

Affairs and Collaborations is primarily responsible

for providing direction, assistance and

synchronizing all of the University’s international

With an increase in demand from Indian students for access to quality higher education and a foreign

degree, international student mobility is expanding on a consistent, year-to-year basis. To prepare

for this future and to become one of the best-known universities internationally in global higher

education rankings, Manipal Academy of Higher Education (‘MAHE’) decided to deploy an international

mobility and partner management platform. Aimed at scaling their operations, improving

administrative efficiencies and streamlining workflows, MoveON will help the International Office to

manage 900 inbound and 750 outbound student mobilities and 350 international partnerships.

Executive Overviewplay

work. Dr Raghu, Director International

Collaborations, manages a team of four and

takes responsibility for creating the strategies for

internationalization, seeking relationships with

potential partners and identifying possible areas

of collaboration. In total, the team manages 900

inbound student mobilities, 750 outbound student

mobilities and 350 international partnerships.

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Vision

A quest for a world class university.

More students than ever before are entering

Higher Education with the aim of gaining the

knowledge and skills they need to succeed in

today’s globalized world. As the growth in the size

of the Indian middle classes escalates, millions

are increasingly able to pay for this education.

Furthermore, with increasing aspirations to access

global education, the popularity of international

student mobility is increasing on a consistent,

year-to-year basis.

To keep pace, MAHE is increasing its profile, not

just in India, but internationally, to increase

their brand value and be the preferred choice for

attracting foreign students, faculty and industry.

Dr Raghu explains that the strategy at MAHE is

to, “become the best-known Indian university

internationally.” In order to scale their operations

and help them manage their international

partnerships and mobilities, MAHE decided to

deploy an international mobility and partner

management platform. As Dr Raghu explains,

“We want to facilitate both knowledge as well as

cultural exchange. We want to be inclusive and

provide equity of educational opportunities.

We want to build capacities in places such as in

Afghanistan and Africa. And then, moreover, we

want to have engagement with our partners which

are meaningful and effective.”

Previously, the International Office had

been managing mobilities through email

communication. This was a heavily paper based

approach. All the workflows were different across

the faculties and retrieving student mobility

and partnership data was laborious and time

consuming, as data had to be acquired from

multiple locations. For the renewal of existing

international partnerships, they relied on their

own in-house built mechanism, which would send

timely notifications to remind them to renew.

To better serve their International Office, MAHE

wanted a single system that could help them to

uniformly manage mobilities and international

partnerships to help them improve administrative

efficiencies and streamline workflows.

“We want to facilitate both knowledge as well as cultural exchange. We want to be inclusive and provide equity of educational opportunities.

www.qs-unisolution.com MoveON | 5

Dr Raghu explains, “When I was visiting one of our

partner universities in Germany, that was the first

time I was introduced to MoveON. I saw how they

were using it and thought that it would make our

processes a lot more efficient.”

Another key factor was that MoveON was a market

leader in Europe with many institutions having

used the solution for some time, to help them

collate, consolidate, collaborate and manage

mobility activity from across the institution in one

place, online. These existing client successes gave

MAHE the confidence that the platform would

enable them to adopt best practices and ensure

that they were going in the right direction to drive

their own internationalization strategy.

The main goal of the university is to drive their

brand and rankings on a global scale and to be in

the top 500 by 2022. In the QS World University

Rankings 2018, MAHE made an unparalleled

breakthrough into the 701-750. They were the

only Indian Private University to achieve this

distinction. Very recently, the Government of

India conferred the status of the “Institution of

Eminence” on MAHE. Dr Raghu says, “By choosing

MoveON, we hope that it helps us to fulfil MAHE’s

internationalization goals in achieving world class

status, from amongst the existing government

and private institutions and new institutions from

the private sector.”

To attract students, MAHE has 10 types of

internationalization initiatives that they continue

to promote in partnership with overseas

universities. To advance these initiatives,

MAHE has taken steps in signing MoUs with

international universities of repute. With very

specific requirements for managing partner

data and agreements, MoUs, and renewals, the

International Office needed the ability to store

partner data online in one place. At the same time,

they also wanted to promote and nurture their

international presence to internal faculty and new

potential partners, and to report on international

activity to their Executive Leadership. They felt

that all of this would be possible with MoveON.

Why MoveON

The right solution to improve the administrative efficiency of the international office.

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MAHE now has a state-of-the-art international

mobility and partnership management technology

platform to scale their operations, make processes

more efficient and streamline the workflow of the

International Office. MoveON will give MAHE the

ability to manage partnerships and keep track of

this very complex web of relationships. With the

obvious benefits of working paperless, staff will be

able to get access to that information more quickly

and more accurately than was previously possible.

Furthermore, MAHE will be able to share its

international initiatives using the Publisher

module of MoveON. From their website, students

will be able to search programs about the types

of mobilities and the relationships available and

faculty can self-serve when they want to find

what existing connections the institution has.

And importantly, this data will be available via

mobile device. Girish Gopalakrishnan, Head of

Product for MoveON, QS Unisolution explains,

“The Publisher module enables MAHE to publish

all the relationships they have not only as a list

with an interactive world map, but they will

be able to display images, videos and present

summary data in an engaging way. And, as the

data is automatically updated in MoveON, it will

be up to date, saving the international office a lot

of time going back and forth with their web team

requesting updates to the website.”

Plus, by making the application process online,

staff will be able to edit and manage information

about incoming and outgoing mobility choices.

Automating the application process allows

document attachments, mandatory fields and

the ability to ‘save to complete’ at the student’s

pace. In addition, faculty coordinators will be

Implementation

MAHE are at an exciting phase in the

implementation of MoveON. Commenting on the

training they received, Dr Ragu said, “We have for

the 22 colleges on campus and 12 departments, so

there was a lot of data from the different faculties

stored in multiple spreadsheets. The trainer was

very patient and was excellent at explaining the

intricate processes involved in extracting the data

from MS Excel to MoveON. The team at QS have

been on hand throughout the implementation

on weekly project calls with Joyce our Inbound

Exchange Coordinator to help with the set up.”

As with any important project, there were

challenges along the way, but the project was a

success thanks to the whole team’s commitment.

Motivated by the enthusiasm and trust of

Joyce and the leadership of Dr Raghu, MoveON

is ready to go live.

Solution & Benefits

Centralizing data in a very decentralized institutional culture.

able to view, approve applications and more

easily communicate with the International Office

– enabling the International Office to become the

mediator facilitating the exchange, rather than

managing it from end to end.

Girish explains, “MoveON will help MAHE to

manage all their applications. They can inform

the student that they’ve been selected, then they

can manage, and for risk management keep track

of where students have gone and communicate

with them during their mobility. For example,

if there is an emergency, MAHE can quickly

communicate with their students. And, when

students return, MAHE will be able to ask them

how their experience was to gather reports to

improve future mobilities.”

Finally, the Communication tools will save

International Coordinators time when liaising with

students. Staff can message one-to-one or in bulk,

create email templates, document templates and

attachments and all this can be logged in MoveON.

By retrieving details from the application, staff

can send announcements and invitation letters

to students in bulk which increases efficiency

and frees up time for staff to focus on more-

strategic initiatives.

Future

With increasing mobilities and partnerships, MAHE

is now better equipped to scale operations and

improve the efficiency of their internationalization

activities. Dr Raghu states, “The team are looking

forward to adopting best practice and taking

advantage of the benefits that institutions globally

have realized in using MoveON.”

Contact details

London Heathgate, UK

Heathgate Place, Agincourt Road

London NW3 2NU

Tel.: +44 (0) 207 284 7200

email: sales@qs-unisolution.com

web: www.qs-unisolution.com