ACCUDEMIA USER SPOTLIGHT
Henry Zonio, Director of the Center for Academic Excellence at Asbury University, was our most recent Accudemia User Spotlight guest. During our monthly meeting, he talked about his center’s experience using Accudemia.
Asbury is a small liberal arts college in Kentucky, and the center mostly serves the residential undergraduate population. They offer course tutoring, writing consulting, and academic coaching. They also work with the college’s accessibility department to arrange testing space. All of these services are tracked in Accudemia, which has been used in the center for about a year.
Henry reports that the center has been very happy with Accudemia, particularly due to its excellent and responsive customer service, and its easy integration with information from the college’s SIS, such as the student course schedules. This makes it much easier for students to find tutoring and other services relevant to their needs. They also love the easy ability to pull reports to see important data and statistics. More information on the features Asbury uses is detailed below, or you can watch the full presentation here.
Getting Additional Information With Session Assessments
The center uses Session Assessments to collect qualitative data and allow tutors to communicate important information about students. Tutors are asked to answer a series of basic questions after each session, including what information was covered, what resources were utilized, and what future plans were discussed. This is informative not only for the center and its stakeholders, but for the faculty as well, to give them additional information about student progress and efforts.
There is also an opportunity on the assessment form for tutors to provide additional information they think center admins need to know about, such as concerns about the student’s ability to access vital resources or tools. This allows the center to go beyond academics and ensure the student can access available college resources such as Student Life or Counseling to maximize their chances of success.
Horsing Around With More Tracking
One unique way the university uses Accudemia is to track the usage of its equine program. This program meets once a week and each student involved has different needs when it comes to learning their necessary skills. When Henry joined Asbury, the program was already in place, and he saw an opportunity to use Accudemia to make tracking the progress of students within the program easier. Henry gave Accudemia access to the staff member in charge of the program, so they could easily add students to the program and view and manage their schedules. He reports that this has streamlined the process especially as compared to the earlier system used to track the program. This is especially helpful as the equine program is off campus, giving Henry and his team peace of mind.
The center also uses Accudemia to schedule testing accommodations, which Henry reports have been a big deal for them. They have a large number of students needing accommodations, especially since students returned from the pandemic. Within a limited space, it’s no longer possible to track these accommodations manually. To keep track of these tests taken and tracked by Accudemia, Henry created testing rooms that could be booked for testing appointments by a student worker. This process was put through its paces during a very busy finals week, and Henry says this process cut the normal scheduling time in half, allowing them to help more students at a greater pace, even with an increased volume of students needing assistance. This and other tracking measures used in Accudemia have gone into reports that Henry can easily pull and present to stakeholders, which has had a positive effect on his center’s funding.
Thank you to Henry for joining our User Spotlight! Again, his full presentation can be viewed here. If you are an Accudemia client and would like to share your experience in a future Accudemia Monthly Meeting, please email rachelc@engineerica.com. And if you are not yet a client, we hope this helps show some of the ways Accudemia can make a big difference for your center.
Join us next time!
Engineerica Systems is pleased to present our Accudemia User Spotlight segment recap for 8/8/2023. 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!
