5 Ways Copilot Can Help Higher Education Administrators

Let Microsoft Copilot translate, organize, and summarize information for you!

ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini… we are currently living in the GPT era. Among many options out there, Copilot by Microsoft has the most potential to be a college administrator’s work friend.

Why? This is because most colleges and universities purchase Microsoft subscriptions that include the Copilot.

Copilot for enterprise comes with a security measure where whatever you enter in Copilot will not be shared with anyone including Microsoft.

To benefit from this, college administrators or students must log in with the email address that is affiliated with your college (.edu email address). Once you are logged in, you will see the green check mark on your Copilot screen which says “Your personal and company data are protected” or “Protected.”

It’s good to know that the information is protected, but really, what can Copilot do for college administrators?

There could be many ways to take advantage of the advancement of technology but I found the following 5 ways the most helpful to optimize the higher education workflow without compromising the quality of work or breaking any rules.

Hope 5 tips could inspire you on how you can integrate AI tools to take some things off your plate to work smarter, not harder.

How to use Copilot for college administrators

1. Create expense reports with receipt images

If you ever went on a work trip, you may understand how time-consuming it could be to organize receipts and compare them with the credit card statement.

It could be a more challenging task if the work trip destination is outside the USA as you or the Travel/ Finance Office needs to translate the item and make sure that the purchased items are acceptable.

Generate expense reports using receipt images

I remember my colleague brought receipts in Korean and had me translate them for her. With Copilot, you don’t have to rely on human resources or enter the item and amount one by one on Excel.

Simply, take a photo of the receipt, upload it to Copilot, and ask it to give you a table! Here are the receipts from Spain. (These are personal receipts and they are not for the official submission.)

Copilot generates the table with purchased items and the amounts

As you can see in the image above, I did not do my best to take a nice photo of the receipt. The background is not white and the photo is rotated. Still, it worked perfectly fine!

It gave me a table with the purchased item in English, and Spanish and the amount in Euros as well as USD!

What is more, you can open this table in Excel. You can repeat the process for all receipts just upend new rows to the first table and…

Voilà! You will get a table for your international work trip in an hour.

How convenient and efficient is this?

Here are a few tips to keep in mind when using Copilot to read your image:

As of today (April 2024), Copilot does not accept multiple images and each image must be uploaded one at a time.
It looks like Copilot may confuse images if you repeat the task. To prevent this, click the chat button to start a new topic. You can copy and paste the prompt and use new images to repeat the task
In order to open/edit a table in Excel, Copilot needs the entire screen. Copilot in the sidebar won’t show you the option to open the table in Microsoft 365 Excel.

2. Translate the transcript

Admissions/ International Office

It’s no surprise that Admissions and International Education Offices often receive transcripts in foreign languages due to the nature of the office.

If your office is not equipped to translate 45+ languages, what should you do? Use Copilot!

Upload the foreign transcript and Copilot will translate it for you

Take a photo or screenshot of the transcript, upload it to Copilot, and ask it to give you the student name, high school name, and GPA, just to name a few.

You don’t need to specify the language in the transcript, Copilot will translate the transcript into English by default and find the student’s name, high school information, GPA, etc.

Copilot can read the screenshot and translate it for you

From there, you can upload the transcript to the student’s record and any other process following your institutional policy!

Advising/ Faculty

This feature can be useful for the Advising Center on campus as well as some faculty when they assist the students with class registration.

Some exchange students may submit transcripts that are not in English. To check if the student meets the pre-requisite requirements, Advising staff and faculty don’t have to ask around to get the transcript translated. As we took a look, with Copilot, all they need to do is just click a few buttons.

Faculty and staff will be able to check off one thing in their to-do lists in less than a minute.

3. Summarize any content and draft emails to share with colleagues/students

Each office on campus may watch government updates or institutional policies to be compliant.

When some updates or announcements are worth sharing with your team and a certain group of students, take advantage of the “Compose” feature of Copilot!

Based on the target audience and the content, you can customize the tone to be…

Professional
Casual
Enthusiastic
Informational
Funny
Succinct

and more!

Likewise, you can choose one of the formats to specify how you are going to use the draft:

Paragraph
Email
Bullet Points
Linkedin Post
Summary
Report

Lastly, you can choose the length of the draft- Short, Medium, or Long- to meet your needs.

For example, I asked Copilot to summarize the USCIS’s update regarding the H-1B visa and provide a draft for an email that I can share with my colleagues. I selected “Informational” for the tone and “Email” for the format, then “Short” for the length.

Let’s take a look at the draft:

“Dear international students,

Exciting news! USCIS has introduced new myUSCIS organizational accounts for collaborative H-1B preparations, effective Feb. 28, 2024. These accounts are essential for the H-1B Electronic Registration Process in March 2024.

Encountered technical issues post-Feb. 14 migration? Re-login might reveal resolutions thanks to our technical updates. For more details, visit the Organizational Accounts FAQ page.

Mark your calendars! The FY 2025 H-1B cap registration opens at noon Eastern on March 6, 2024, closing on March 22. Remember, registration requires a USCIS online account and payment for each beneficiary.

New this year: Provide valid passport or travel document info for each beneficiary during registration – it’s mandatory for entry into the U.S. if granted an H-1B visa.

Stay tuned for the upcoming online filing of Form I-129 and associated Form I-9 in March.

Best, [Your Name]”

I would refrain from using the draft for publication, and it wouldn’t hurt to let your colleagues or readers know that the content is summarized/drafted by Copilot even when you use the draft internally.

4. Create social media captions

Just like you would have Copilot summarize the content and draft an email, you can also select “Casual” and “LinkedIn Post” to get social media captions.

LinkedIn Post format can be used for all social media posts and it will automatically add emojis and hashtags for you which is very nice.

This feature will be especially useful for administrators in small offices who wear many hats.

For this example, I will use the farewell party event’s description and ask Copilot to give me the social media captions and here’s what Copilot wrote:

“🎓🌍 Attention all graduating international and exchange students! 🎉

Join us at the farewell party to celebrate your achievements! 🥳

🗓️ Thursday, April 25 | ⏰ 4:30 – 7:30 PM | 📍 Campus Center

Snacks, fun, and a special T-shirt signing event await you! Don’t miss out – it’s first-come, first-served! #classof2024”

As you can see, Copilot did a great job clearly listing the date, time, and location for the event as well as details like who are invited and what they can expect.

Writing a social media caption is not rocket science but it definitely helps administrators to prioritize tasks that they need to focus on and kind of outsource tasks that can be done by Copilot.

5. Create images for campus events

Lastly, it is worth mentioning that Copilot is capable of generating the image powered by DALL-E 3 as of April 2024.

For example, if you would like to submit the “Eclipse watch party” event but don’t have any photos taken for this event that you can use, have Copilot generate an image for you.

I typed “students watching the eclipse with glasses” and Copilot could create an image for me.

It is important to note that images created by Copilot Enterprise can be used for institutional needs under the Copilot Copyright Commitment introduced back in September 2023.

Click here to learn more about the Copilot Copyright Commitment– Basically, Microsoft promised a strong commitment to defend customers who used the Copilot-generated images and will pay for any lawsuits.

It is recommended to check with your institution to learn what will be the policy to use Copilot-generated images. Recommended practice is to add a watermark/disclaimer that the “image generated by Copilot.”

Additionally, if your school has Microsoft subscriptions that include Copilot for Microsoft 365 (work) license, you can unlock more powerful features like creating presentations with natural languages.

How to write prompts to get the best results?

There are many articles out there about how to write a prompt for GPT tools. One of the best practices includes specifying the role.

For example, it is recommended to start with “I am an International Student Advisor” followed by what you are trying to do. In the same light, you can also give the role to the tool by saying “You are an International Student Advisor and you would like to summarize the following content and share it with your team in the International Office.”

Similarly, when writing a prompt to generate an image, you can specify the style like watercolor, oil painting, pop art, futuristic, modern, and Van Gogh style, just to name a few. The following table refers to this YouTube video.

View

Frame

Art/ Photo

Style

Others