TECH TALK SESSION
Earlier this year, Senior Support Specialist Nick Armstrong went over some tutor management tips in Accudemia during our monthly Tech Talk. He recently went over some additional tips in our latest Tech Talk, such as how to help tutors access important functions in Accudemia and useful reports to manage your tutors and staff easier. Watch those new tips and find out how to perform these functions in Accudemia here, or read on for a summary.
Getting Started
The beginning of the semester is when the majority of your tutor management will take place; ideally, once everything is set up, you should mostly just be making adjustments as tutor schedules and assignments change. Nick went over some of this in our earlier meeting, but just as a refresher, here are the basic steps you’ll want to complete when you first start using Accudemia, and at the beginning of each new term:
- Create Tutors: If your tutors are already users in the system (such as students who are also peer tutors), you can simply add the tutor role to these users. If they do not already exist, you’ll need to create them either manually or via import. You should also remove the tutor role from any user who is no longer working as a tutor, and deactivate any user no longer affiliated with your center and school (just be careful not to delete them, or you will compromise your historical data!). You’ll also want to add the courses they are assigned to help with, if any. This can be done manually or via import.
- Create Schedules: Generally, tutor schedules will change every term, although if you have a tutor or support staff member with the same schedule, you can copy it from the previous semester. Assuming it needs to be created from scratch, however, you have the option to either set them up yourself as an admin or give tutors the ability to set up their schedules, depending on what works best for you and your center.
- Additional Permissions: If you need your tutors or support staff to perform more functions than the tutor role offers, you can set additional permissions, either for all users with the tutor role or for individual users. We’ll go over these additional permissions in the next section, along with some examples.
Managing Student Visits
Think about the various ways your tutors and support staff might assist, which can come in the form of additional permissions, or just helpful training they may need.
- Helping with Student Visits: There may be additional permissions you’ll want to provide tutors to allow them to assist with student visits. Options here include allowing tutors to create sign-in stations, allowing them to schedule appointments for students as administrators, and allowing them to manage a waiting line if you have one enabled. You might also simply wish to train them to show students how to sign in and how to make appointments.
- Helping with Virtual Visits: If your center offers virtual meetings, make sure that tutors know how to set up their virtual meeting links and connect to virtual meetings either through our Zoom integration or Connect Links.
- Helping with Calendar Integration: If your account qualifies for the Outlook 365 Calendar integration and your tutors use Outlook, they can have their calendar sync with Accudemia. This can make it much easier to manage their appointments and off time. This will need to be set up individually for each tutor, so if it’s a feature you wish to take advantage of, consider providing documentation or showing tutors how to set it up themselves.
- Assigning Tutor Tasks: If your tutors use Accudemia to log their time, you can collect more than just time in and out. The Tutor Task feature allows you to create a list of tasks, similar to services for students, which a tutor or staff member can select when signing in to denote how they will be spending their time during their shift. For example, they may be working with students, leading a workshop, or creating a study guide. This can greatly assist with time management for tutors and can also help ensure your time reports are as accurate as possible.
Helping Tutors with Processes
These are the common, simple, but important processes that tutors will often need to perform during their shift that involve Accudemia.
- Logging into Accudemia from the Back End: Tutors should learn how to sign into Accudemia either using the main login page or using Single Sign-On. A dummy tutor account, or using the account of an existing tutor as an example and recording that process, is an easy way for you to help current and future tutors access Accudemia.
- Signing in for Work Hours: Not all centers track tutor hours through Accudemia, but if you do, tutors can sign in either at the kiosk or they can track their hours remotely. Whichever way works for your center and tutors, it’s a good idea to demonstrate that process. If you choose remote sign-in, keep in mind you’ll have to enable to that to provide tutors access.
- Completing Session Log Comments and Assessments: Tutors can leave general comments on a Session Log, or you can ask them to fill out a more formal Assessment to track specific information about the session. The Session Assessment would be a questionnaire that you design, which a tutor can then fill out at the end of a session.
Helpful Reports
Many users know that the reports section of Accudemia contains valuable information about student visits, but they can also greatly help you manage your tutors and staff as well.
- User Roles and Permissions: This report shows a list of user roles and assigned permissions, which can be helpful for auditing access and making sure everyone has what they need, and that no one has access to anything they shouldn’t.
- Permissions by Role Templates: A Role Template can be applied to a user to quickly assign them important permissions. This report shows what permissions will be applied by each template, allowing you to review what’s available, and what changes might need to be made. This can be especially helpful if you are taking over an Accudemia Management role where the predecessor has already created Role Templates.
- Tutors with Connect Links: For virtual meetings, if you want to ensure that all applicable tutors have successfully configured their individual meeting links, this is a quick and easy way to check that.
- External Calendar Integration Status: Similar to the Connect Links report, this report will show you which tutors or staff have connected their external calendars to Accudemia.
- Tutor Hours with Tasks: This report displays the sign-in and out hours for tutors, as well as any tasks they chose for each shift. There are many filters available for this report, making it useful for regular reporting.
- Tutor Hours Summary with Tasks: Similar to the above report, this one provides a summary of hours, in case you simply need to review the raw number of hours a tutor was signed in for.
Again, if you want to see demos of how to perform these functionalities and access these features, as well as answers to some related questions, be sure to watch Nick’s full presentation. Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you at the next Accudemia Tech Talk!
Join us next time!
Join us next time!
Engineerica Systems is pleased to present our Tech Tip segment recap for the Accudemia session on 10/10/2023. 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. Each week, we’ll follow up Tech Tip Tuesday with a blog recapping that week’s topic. 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!