No Meeting? No Problem! Why and How You Should Track Asynchronous Support in Your Student Center

TECH TALK SESSION

Many student support centers offer some kind of asynchronous support, such as responding to quick questions or reviewing essays without a formal session. Often, these sessions are not recorded or organized in a straightforward way, making it difficult for these centers to understand or report on the impact this type of support is having on students and their center. Recently, Accudemia released the streamlined and flexible Support Drop Box, which was designed from the ground up to help centers keep track of asynchronous support instances, and to make it easy for students to request this type of support. In this month’s Accudemia Tech Talk, Support Specialist Justin Veerasammy demonstrated this new feature, and talked about some of the ways centers can utilize it. You can watch the full demo here, or read on for a summary!

The Drop Box can be easily accessed by logging into the system and going to Center Attendance > Support Drop Box. Users will then see options based on their role. For example, students will only be able to see the tickets they have opened or that have been opened for them, but tutors will be able to see tickets that have been assigned to them to support, and admins can see all tickets.

When opening a ticket, in addition to the fields mentioned above, students can enter a subject and description, and can also attach files if needed. The account and center administrators can customize a welcome message for the page and instructions that appear when a student goes to open a ticket, which can be very helpful in ensuring submitted tickets adhere to the center’s policies. It’s also a good place to mention an estimated response time, so students have a good idea of what to expect. Accudemia can send out notifications to both the student and tutor when tickets are added, assigned, closed, or otherwise changed or added to. 

Once a ticket has been created and assigned to a staff member, the staff member can look at the student’s profile if one has been created, and can respond to the ticket or make changes to its status. Students are also able to update the status of the ticket. It’s very easy for all parties involved with the ticket to see its history and the communication between the student and tutor. Each update will be associated with a specific time and date. 

And of course, as with most Accudemia features, there are associated reports! The new report for the Drop Box module allows administrators to view the information for all tickets submitted within a specified date range, at either the college or center level.

The Support Drop Box is a great way to track any type of support in your center that isn’t tied to a specific visit. If you’re not tracking these interactions, you may be missing out on a vital piece of your center’s overall data picture, one that shows the broader impact your staff and services are making on student success. If you are an Accudemia user, the Drop Box has already been set up for you; all you and your students need to do is use it. And if you aren’t yet an Accudemia user, get in touch with us today to learn how this and other features can make management of your student support center easier. Again, you can watch the full demonstration here. Thank you to Justin for the great Tech Talk and we hope to see you at the next session!

Join us next time!
Engineerica Systems is pleased to present our Tech Tip segment recap for the Accudemia session on 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. 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!