ACCUDEMIA USER SPOTLIGHT
Dawn Apple and Karen Dulweber from Kilgore College were our User Spotlight guests for February, who talked about how their center uses Accudemia in their Writing Studio to help manage student appointments and traffic without overloading their tutors. Click here to watch their full presentation, or read on for a summary!
Kilgore College, a junior college in northeast Texas, uses Accudemia in the Writing Studio, which is part of the college’s Quality Enhancement Plan, or QEP. As the studio expanded what courses it served and how many students it supported, it needed a better tracking system than the previous pencil-and-paper method. They started using AccuSQL, another Engineerica product, but later found that Accudemia’s cloud-based design better fit their needs.
One of the primary advantages they enjoy with Accudemia is the ability for students to make their own appointments from any location. To not overload any individual tutor, rather than showing tutor names on the schedule, the studio has set up “Tutor Slots” in Accudemia, rather than showing tutor names. This way, students are making an appointment for time with a writing tutor, but are not choosing who specifically they work with at the studio, allowing them to load balance and adjust tutor schedules with minimal disruption.
To accomplish this, while they schedule staff availability they use two different scheduling modes available in Accudemia: “Term mode” and “Merged mode”. The center always has at least two tutors available per hour, so they use “Term mode” to set up the weekly schedules by creating “tutors” named “Tutor Slot 1” and “Tutor Slot 2.” While “Term mode” assumes a schedule will be the same week after week for the same semester, the “Merged mode” allows you to set up a different schedule for every week or even every day. So, for any additional slots that are not regularly available, Dawn set up additional hours to reflect when additional tutors are available.
This setup benefits both the center and the students because it empowers the students to create their own appointments that opens up a ton of time for staff, and thanks to Accudemia’s customizability, the center managers have peace of mind that students are unable to overbook tutors or bypass any other restrictions in place. Using data pulled from the institution’s SIS also ensures that students only select from the courses they are registered to, eliminating the chances for user error. Additionally, while the Writing Studio primarily serves students on an “appointment only” basis, they will typically take walk-ins if an appointment cancels or doesn’t take as long as anticipated.
Thank you to Dawn and Karen for sharing how they use Accudemia to enhance their services and manage their center more easily! 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 2/14/2023. 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 Monthly Accudemia Session to find out more about our next session and for more ideas about helping our students achieve success!
