Faculty Referrals Simplified

15 April 2022

TECH TALK SESSION

Accudemia’s referral system allows you to track referrals in two ways: referrals to your location, and referrals from your location. This week’s Tech Talk, hosted by Senior Support Specialist Nick Armstrong, focused on the former, specifically on the most common type of referral we see our clients use: those from instructors. This is when an instructor refers a student to your area because they believe the student could benefit from your services. Watch the full talk here or read on to learn the main highlights!

Common Referral Questions
Nick addressed some common questions our staff receives about referrals. The first is, “Can anyone fill out a referral?” Within Accudemia, referrals must be filled out by instructors who are assigned to at least one class. However, keep in mind that you can assign instructor roles to anyone you want, so if there are staff members in other areas that may need to fill out referrals, you can give them the Instructor role and create “classes” that include all the students they may need to refer. This could include advisors or staff from another student service.

The second most common question about the topic is, “Do instructors have to log in to submit a referral?” For security purposes, a user must be logged in to Accudemia to submit a referral, but if you have single sign-on enabled for your account, this process is much easier for all users. This means that instructors (along with all of your users) will not have to memorize a separate set of login credentials for Accudemia; they’ll simply be able to sign in from the college website.

Referrals page in AccudemiaSetting Up Referrals
Setting up referrals in Accudemia is a simple process with just a few steps.

  • Build the Referral Form: From the main menu in Accudemia, navigate to Administration > Advanced > Referral Templates. Click the “New Template” button to set up a new referral template. From there, you can set up your survey to ask whatever questions you’d like, and it can have multiple pages as well, which is especially useful if you need to have different sections for different types of questions or referral sources. The setup is similar to Accudemia surveys or Session Assessments, so if you’re familiar with either of those features, you’ll feel right at home here.
  • Advertise the Center Referrals: This is the point that you will let your instructors know about the referral form and where they can go to fill it out. The link to send them to is https://mycollege.accudemia.net/private/referrals#/f/referrals/edit, replacing “mycollege” with your account’s domain. You can also get this link by going to Class Attendance > Referrals > + New Referral and copying the URL in your browser. Remember that they will need to have an account and log into Accudemia to access the referrals and complete one for one of their students.
  • Manage the Referrals: Once instructors start filling out referrals, you’ll need to manage them in Accudemia. If your email template is set up, you should receive an email whenever a referral is created, and you can also check by going to Class Attendance > Referrals from the main menu in Accudemia. All referrals will show as one of four statuses with corresponding colors: New (blue), Follow-up (yellow), Requires attention (red), and Closed (green). The “Follow-up” status means that someone has been assigned to the referral and there is a date by which that person should follow up. “Requires attention” means that the date has passed. Hopefully, you’ll see lots of “Closed” referrals in green, which means the student has been worked with and the particular issue has been resolved or addressed. Make sure you and your staff are in agreement on what constitutes a “Closed” status so that they can be resolved appropriately.
    To follow up or add notes to any Referral, click on the student’s name. You can also assign the Referral to someone else, change the due date, or close the Referral.

If you have any questions about using Referrals, watch the full presentation or contact Support. Thanks for reading and we hope to see you at the next Accudemia Weekly Session!

Join us next time!
Engineerica Systems is pleased to present our Tech Tip segment recap for 4/12/2022 for the weekly Accudemia sessions. Held every Tuesday at 1 pm EST, 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. If you’re an Accudemia client and would like to join us for the next session, just visit
https://www.engineerica.com/accudemia-weekly-sessions/.