ACCUDEMIA USER SPOTLIGHT
Derek Fincham, from Davis & Elkins College, a small private college in Appalachia, uses Accudemia in the Naylor Learning Center to help manage its traffic and operations. Take a look at Derek’s full discussion, or read on for a summary.
When Derek started in 2013, all sign-ins and outs were on paper sheets, with different colors for different student groups. Work-study students would then spend several weeks compiling the data into a report for stakeholders. Derek’s previous institution had digitized its processes before he left, and he wanted to do the same at the Naylor Center. They started with Google Forms, which was better, but had significant limitations, as it still required a lot of conversion of data in Excel and resulted in a lot of missing or incorrect data.
After about a year, one of Derek’s colleagues built a custom program for the center to use. This worked for about four more years, but the data reporting was still manual. Again, this took a lot of time and was prone to errors.
After the colleague left the college, Derek started researching outside options and quickly decided that Accudemia was the right product for the Naylor Learning Center. They joined a little over a year ago, and Derek reports that onboarding was very smooth, thanks to our awesome support team.
Now, the reporting process at the end of the term, which used to take days or longer, takes only hours. In addition, it’s now much easier for students to understand how many hours they have (since many students, such as athletes, are required to spend a certain number of hours in the center per semester). This used to require a search of the data and manual calculation of the hours, but with Accudemia, it is no longer necessary. Derek can easily search for the student and find a report of their hours in just seconds.
On top of that, Accudemia allows Derek to generate automatic reports to stakeholders, regarding at-risk and other students of interest. Stakeholders having regular access to this data, instead of only finding out once or twice a term, can be a great way to generate goodwill and to show the effectiveness of a center on student success.
One big thing that Derek learned after switching to Accudemia was that the center was misrepresenting itself. They were doing a lot more work than they were getting credit for. They learned that they now assist 61% of their student population and an increase of over 4,000 visits versus last year, a number they would have missed if they were using Google Forms or their homegrown system. Engineerica has seen this again and again: that access to accurate data isn’t just convenient, but can completely transform a center’s position and outlook.
If you want to learn a little bit more about how the Naylor Learning Center uses Accudemia, watch the full discussion here. Thank you, Derek, for sharing your experience with our audience!
Join us next time!
Engineerica Systems is pleased to present our Accudemia User Spotlight segment recap for 8/22/2022. 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!
