Accudemia Featured Speaker: Just-in-Time Messages and Data Collection with Rena Burton of University of California Riverside

14 February 2022

ACCUDEMIA USER SPOTLIGHT

Rena Burton, Director of the Academic Resource Center (ARC) at the University of California Riverside, was our featured Accudemia user for the week of February 8th at our Accudemia Weekly Meeting. If you want to view Rena’s full presentation, click here.

About the ARC
The ARC is the only department at the very large university that provides centralized academic and other support services such as Supplemental Instruction and Peer Mentoring for UCR’s undergraduate population. Their personnel size and attendance numbers reflect this, with 16 full-time staff, about 180 student employees, and about 6,500 undergraduate students served annually.

Traffic Management with Accudemia
The ARC uses Accudemia to manage employee schedules and arrange appointments for students. They also use it to track events programming that they offer throughout the year, such as a “Breakfast After Dark” study event during finals week. Accudemia allows them to reach out to students who might benefit from specific events for marketing purposes. For example, if they are holding an event just for second-year students, they can email all qualified students through Accudemia using the User Groups and Messaging features.

During the Covid pandemic, Accudemia became especially helpful for the ARC. Rena explained that the center used it to create their virtual sessions using the Accudemia-Zoom integration and to be able to manage sessions from a distance.

Data Collection and Reporting
With all this usage for traffic management, the ARC also takes advantage of Accudemia to track trends in their traffic patterns. They use Accudemia to see information such as the number of students that use the ARC both quarterly and annually, peak usage times, usage by specific populations (student-athletes, TRIO programs, etc), and course demand. Rena mentioned that she is often asked for this information on an unpredictable basis, and it’s great to already have that information available so that she doesn’t have to speculate or take a lot of time to respond. The ease of access to the information is also useful for things such as grant applications, scheduling, and hiring needs.

Thank you to Rena for sharing how your center uses Accudemia. If you are an Accudemia user and would like to share your experience during an Accudemia weekly session, email Rachel Cook. And if you would like to learn more about how the ARC uses Accudemia, click here to watch Rena’s full presentation.

Join us next time
Engineerica Systems is pleased to present our Accudemia User Spotlight segment recap for 2/1/2022 for the weekly Accudemia sessions. We hope that these questions help you to ponder how you might utilize Accudemia and other innovations in your own center. Join us next Tuesday at 1:00 p.m. EST for our Weekly Accudemia Session and for more ideas about helping our students achieve success!