Supplemental Instruction-Style Tutoring at Indiana Wesleyan University

ACCUDEMIA USER SPOTLIGHT

Kate Austin, the Assistant Director of the TLC at Indiana Wesleyan University, joined our most recent Accudemia User Spotlight to talk about the non-traditional way her center uses Accudemia. You can watch Kate’s full presentation here!

Adopting Accudemia and the Evolving TLC
Indiana Wesleyan switched to Accudemia from Accutrack in 2021. The tutoring center serves just under 2000 residential students. The TLC has existed since 2015 and uses a Supplemental Instruction-style approach to accommodate for their smaller student population and limited staff as well as to address the discovery that it takes about 7-8 sessions for a student to see an impact on their grades. They do offer one-on-one tutoring for TRiO students.

After focusing on gen ed and frequently failed classes, the TLC has shifted towards STEM, Nursing, and Humanities classes, which they have found to be the most helpful for the highest number of students.

Results: Better Numbers and Center Management
After implementing Accudemia in the fall of 2021, the TLC saw a significant increase in their usage hours from students as compared to the fall of 2019 (fall 2020 data was omitted from the comparison due to the pandemic). They attribute this jump to the use of Accudemia itself, as it allowed their students to easily access the TLC services more often. It has also helped the TLC in regard to their reporting capabilities, reminding students about their upcoming appointments, and overall management of their center. It is easier and faster to make appointments for students, easy for tutors to switch to web-based assistance when necessary, and the ability to enforce their attendance policy since the tracking and monitoring of the appointments and sessions were improved.

The TLC uses Accudemia mainly as a management system rather than a self-scheduling tool, due to the setup of their services. Now when there are students wanting assistance they fill out an application that includes their available meeting times, the center matches them with an existing group, and schedules the group tutoring session for the course they need assistance with at the center. Being able to send students text message reminders has proved to be a very effective way to help students remember their upcoming appointments.

Reporting has been another boon for the center’s use of Accudemia.  Accudemia improves their ability to see the progress of students who are utilizing their services throughout the semester, and their end-of-semester report takes about half the time it would with their previous system. Since their center has grown in the last few years, it’s imperative to see which areas they should focus on for growth, including which courses to offer assistance, and which students are not utilizing as much.

Thank you to Kate for sharing her center’s unique experience with Accudemia. We hope it gives you some ideas for how Accudemia can be flexibly utilized in your center. We encourage you to watch Kate’s full presentation to learn more.

Join us next time
Engineerica Systems is pleased to present our Accudemia User Spotlight segment recap for 1/19/2023 for our Accudemia sessions. We hope that these questions 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!