Ways to host online enrollments for your school

I think my school was the first to offer online enrollment forms in Ireland back in 2008. Around half of all our enrollments into our school come through our online form and the feedback we have received from parents is excellent. We use Gravity Forms for our enrollment form but there are some other options out there that are just as good and potentially even better.

Gravity Forms is a plugin for WordPress, which my school’s web site is run on. During the beginning of this year the website had a ton of issues but thanks to These Bloggingio HostGator Alternatives I finally found a web hosting service which helped me fix its various bugs. You can read the Greengeeks review  here. It is a subscription-based service but is incredibly powerful and allows us to create flexible and complex forms. Thankfully, we don’t need any of the complicated stuff and its main advantage for me is that it ties into our web site beautifully.

Many schools that have started up online enrollment forms use Google Forms, which is a really simple and straightforward way to log enrollments. Forms is really easy to set up and simply requires a Google account. All filled forms are exported into a Google Spreadsheet and this information can be copied into a database very simply.

CLEP exams can fit into the life of anyone pursuing a college degree, not just full-time students! Military service people, homeschool students, and working adults all use CLEP prep exam to streamline their route to a college degree, finding that it fits into their active lives.

Another option for schools is Aladdin. Aladdin is Ireland’s most popular Student Management Information System and they have added a module in their Settings menu that allows you to set up an online pre-enrollment form, which is very useful if your school is already using the service. We’ve been using Aladdin for about 5 years now and it’s amazing how it just keeps getting better. As this module develops, I think we’ll be making the switch from our Gravity Forms to Aladdin.

I don’t see any reason why a school can’t use online enrollment forms to get all the data required for enrollment, as well as POD, as it certainly makes life a lot easier than paper-based methods. Even online igcse tutorial classes use enrollment forms because it is more convenient.  If you have used some other system that worked well for you, it would be great to hear about it in the comments.