ACCUDEMIA USER SPOTLIGHT
Amber Hamilton, Coordinator of the Tutorial Center at Slippery Rock University, was our latest User Spotlight guest at our Accudemia Monthly Meeting, where she shared some of the ways her center uses Accudemia to track usage of their center and enhance their services. You can watch Amber’s full presentation here, or read on to learn the highlights!
When Amber took over management of the center a couple of years ago, she quickly realized the homegrown system they were using was not working for them. Many processes were still being done manually, and those that were being managed by the system were complicated. They landed on Accudemia as the system that would best fit their needs and help them do what they needed to do.
One of their favorite features is the Announcements, which allows them to show welcome back messages and other important information, such as contact information for other resources on campus. Offering this information made them realize the system could be beneficial for these resources to use, and their students as well, as they would no longer have to use multiple systems to access these services.
Another big benefit Amber has found with Accudemia is the ease of tracking group tutoring. They have labeled their services so that students can easily make appointments for group tutoring and know exactly what they’ll be signing up for and where they should go for support.
Amber also loves the reports available in Accudemia. Of the many reports available, her favorites are Tutor Hours, Attendance by Service, and Traffic Analysis. The Attendance Summary report, another top one for Amber, shows important, actionable information such as the total number of visits and unique visitors, information they could not have captured before Accudemia, even with external analysis. This helps her and her staff make important decisions, such as a recent one to open their center on certain weekends to meet demand. These reports are useful not only for internal purposes to see information like their busiest days of the week but also for initiatives like certifications with CRLA. She encourages other Accudemia users to experiment with different reports, filters, and file types, to find the report that works best for their needs.
They’ve made great use of Surveys in Accudemia as well, which allows them to collect timely student feedback shortly after sessions. Previously, they struggled to collect student feedback even with incentives such as gift cards, when sending out surveys to students via platforms such as Qualtrix. Aside from the Accudemia surveys showing very positive feedback for the center, the number of responses from the survey was more than three times the responses received using the previous platform. It turns out that the best way to get students to take surveys is to make it easy for them to take them, and with Accudemia, students see the survey right at the sign-in station. This allows them to fill it out immediately, whereas before they may not have seen or forgotten about the survey emailed to them. They have also surveyed students to ask how they like Accudemia vs. the old manual processes, and 98% reported preferring Accudemia!
Amber has been leveraging newer features of Accudemia as well, to collect more useful data for her center to show its impact on the overall university. For example, she has made use of the recently added Support DropBox module to allow students to submit requests for tutoring and help her recruit tutors for needed subject areas. So many processes have been able to be migrated to Accudemia that Amber is amazed at how much manual paperwork has been cut down on since she started.
Thank you so much to Amber for sharing her experience with Accudemia. Again, her full presentation can be viewed here. If you are an Accudemia client and would like to share your experience at an upcoming User Spotlight segment, please get in touch with Rachel Cook. If you are not yet a client and are interested in learning more about how Accudemia can be leveraged for your center or institution, get in touch with us today!
Join us next time!
Engineerica Systems is pleased to present our Accudemia User Spotlight segment recap for 9/12/2023. 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 Weekly Accudemia Session to find out more about our next session and for more ideas about helping our students achieve success!
