Student Relationship Management: Concept, Practice and Technological Support
Maria Beatriz Piedade, Maribel Yasmina Santos failure, as well to propose means to promote the scholarly success, were promoted by institutions [2], [3]. The set of problems raised by failure are studied and analyzed in different ways [4]. However, there is a strong conviction that the students’ behavior and students’ attitudes towards the teaching-learning process is not as helpful as it should be [5]. It is largely accepted that a way to promote students’ success is by implementing mechanisms that allow the students closely monitoring, the evaluation of their success and the approximation of the teacher/tutor to their day-by-day activities. These presuppose, among others, the development of processes to follow the students (like tutoring processes) and monitoring academic student’s behaviour. Although several efforts, these processes do not take place in a greater number of higher education institutions, because these activities are not compatible with the work overload of the teaching staff, the large number of students in academic years with larger failure rate and the lack of institutional practices and technological support to closely follow the students’ academic activities. Also, there is no technological tool available in market that adequately supports those practices. This happen because the majority of the available applications are used exclusively to support academic management processes. In order to overcome these conceptual and technological limitations, this paper proposes a system which aim is to support students closely monitoring of their academic activities and their academic behaviour. The proposed system will be designate by SRM System – Student Relationship Management System – and supports the SRM concept and the SRM practice, which will be also defined in this paper. Underlying to the SRM concept is the scholar success promotion, through the maintenance of a