Tracking Faculty Referrals with Frances Whaley of Kishwaukee College

8 February 2022

ACCUDEMIA USER SPOTLIGHT

We were delighted to have Frances Whaley from Kishwaukee College as our spotlight user at our Accudemia Weekly Session on February 1st. Frances spoke about how Accudemia is utilized for tutoring services, and how they see themselves using it in the upcoming semesters. Click here to see the full session!

The tutoring services at Kishwaukee College, a small community college in Illinois, are housed in the library and are conducted primarily by professional and paraprofessional tutors. The center provides many services besides tutoring, including subject-based labs and academic coaching, most of which are managed within Accudemia, and many are offered both in-person and online.

Tutoring Assessments
One feature Kishwaukee has found very useful is the Tutoring Assessment. When viewing Session Logs, tutors can fill out an assessment, which they use for multiple services, and allows the tutor to select different topics that the session focused on, depending on the type of support that was provided. This form is an electronic version of a paper form that tutors had already been filling out before Accudemia, so the transition for tutors was easy, and it cut down on a lot of paperwork for the center overall! Instructors can request that the center set up automatic weekly reports, which include any assessment data.

Referrals
Recently, in the fall term, the center began using the Referrals feature of Accudemia as well. Kishwaukee has an early alert system that allows faculty to submit concerns about students to an advisor. If the concern relates to tutoring, the advisor will submit a Referral through Accudemia to the tutoring center. The referral allows the center to track the students who have been sent to them, what they’ve been sent for, and show data on whether or not the students have attended their services. The instructor or referrer can also be notified if the student attends services, or does not follow through.

The referral itself shows the history of the process, details about the student and their course, and any notes put in by academic coaches, faculty, advisors, or tutors. Although students cannot be forced to visit the center just because they have been referred, the students can be notified if a referral has been submitted for them, which encourages them to follow through and take advantage of the center’s services. Although referrals are primarily submitted by advisors, any staff member, including tutors, can submit referrals for students of concern.

Thank you again to Frances for joining us in this week’s session! If you'd like to view her full presentation, click here.

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!