As an academic representative on my programme at Manchester Metropolitan, I had an important role in the process of student democracy— representing the views of my peers to the university, trying to strike a balance between the needs of students and the requirements of the institution.

Working through large volumes of data and feedback can be challenging. To make the process more efficient, I decided to establish a system that would streamline some of the processes involved in academic representation.

By doing this, I was able to address all the feedback I received, maintain constant communication with the student body, and have my efforts recognised as Course Rep of the Semester across the Faculty of Business and Law.

Data collection and management

I was unsure whether to use a database or a low-code solution for data storage, like Microsoft Dataverse, Airtable or even Notion.

I opted for Notion for a few reasons:

• Automation and Integration
  Notion offers some integrations, but notably, allows for sending HTTP requests. This makes it really easy to automate tasks using serverless functions.
• Data collection
  Notion can generate user-friendly forms that connect directly to databases.
• Sharing
  Workspaces and pages can easily be shared with granular permissions.

Besides comments, I maintained a separate table of matters. When a comment was submitted, I (or another course rep) would associate it with any relevant cases we were working on (or create a new one). This was particularly useful for quantifying how many students were affected by a particular issue, helping us to both prioritise cases that required the most attention, and to advocate on the basis of clearly demonstrated student impact.

Automation

There were two platforms I used for automating tasks with the data stored in Notion: Azure Functions and Pipedream.

One of the important aspects of academic representation is maintaining constant communication with students. I wanted to automate some parts of this, so my peers could have a better idea of how their feedback is acted upon and when.

Pipedream was especially helpful in this. Students would be updated on progress regarding issues that affected them, based on the comments they submitted.

For more advanced automations, Azure Functions was more appropriate. For example, using Puppeteer, I was able to automatically generate .pdf reports that could be distributed to University staff, departments and services.