ACCUDEMIA USER SPOTLIGHT
The College of San Mateo is one of three schools in the San Mateo County Community College District, all of which use Accudemia to track various student services. Four of their employees recently joined our Accudemia Weekly Session and were featured in our User Spotlight Segment to talk about their experience with Accudemia. View their full discussion here, or read on for a summary!
About the College
CSM uses what they refer to as a decentralized model of support. The college has seven centers using Accudemia, all of which offer subject-specific assistance, such as a Math Center, a Science Center, an ESL Center, and a Writing Center.
The ESL Center offers instructional and general support for students enrolled in ESL classes. General support includes things like tech support and registration, but their main focus is on assisting with class activities and assignments such as conversation practice or essay writing. They also offer events such as a book club and a parents’ group.
Virtual Meetings and Appointments
Before the pandemic, the center mainly used Accudemia for attendance tracking, which was especially important for the required hours some students needed to have. Since then, the required hours have been eliminated, and their main focus is on appointments. Before the pandemic, the appointment process was informal and paper-based. Once they went online and tried out a few options, they realized using Accudemia for appointment sign-ups would be the best option, especially since the college had integrated Accudemia with their Single Sign-on, making access to the system much easier for students, and students were familiar with using Accudemia across the college system in general. It was also a good option for staff, some of whom work in multiple locations which use Accudemia.
They have seen multiple benefits from using appointments in Accudemia, including allowing staff to take a “hands-off” approach since students make their appointments according to policies and restrictions which have already been set up behind the scenes. Notifications allow staff and students to keep track of appointments and since students now receive reminders, their no-show rate has reduced significantly.
Kim Sheehan, who works in the Writing Center, highlighted the email templates that the college uses for center management. They use 11 templates, with 33 potential variations. The appointment confirmation template, for example, will change when emailed out depending on the location where the student has made the appointment. They also customized the emails’ display names to show as coming from the college, and not from Accudemia, to eliminate any potential confusion for students. Each email contains clear instructions on what the student should do before and at the time of their appointment. This eliminates much of the manual work for center staff to keep students informed about their sessions.
To create such a customized email template, they have written and inserted some coding with the help of our Support team. If you are an Accudemia client and you want to create more customized email templates, don’t hesitate to let us know! We are happy to help.
Session Assessments
The CSM team also discussed the Session Assessments that they have set up in Accudemia, and how they report on them. Support staff provided a summary of what they worked on with the student, and what advice they gave them. The Tutoring Assessment Detailed Report shows the students’ instructors the results of those assessments so that they can be kept in the loop on the assistance their students are receiving. Accudemia makes it easy to ensure that each instructor only sees the reports for their students.
Thank you to Ron, Kim, Jill, and Margaret for joining us this week! Again, you can watch their full presentation here.
Join us next time!
Engineerica Systems is pleased to present our Accudemia User Spotlight segment recap for 3/22/2022. Held Tuesdays at 1 pm EST (weekly during the academic year, and monthly during the summer), Accudemia clients can join a session to learn about a quick, useful topic from one of our Support Specialists. We hope that these examples help you to ponder how you might utilize Accudemia and other innovations in your own center. Check the page about our Monthly Accudemia Session to find out more about our next session and for more ideas about helping our students achieve success!
