Student Perspective in Accudemia

TECH TALK SESSION

 

During meetings with clients, we’re often asked, what does Accudemia look like from the student perspective, and what can the student do while they’re logged into Accudemia? After all, signing in at the sign-in station is different from logging into the system, and center managers want to be mindful of asking students to log into too many places, so they need to know the advantages for students.

The answer to what students can do will depend a lot on the settings and permissions of your particular account, but Nick Armstrong, Software Support Manager, walked attendees through the main things students can generally do once they log into Accudemia. Here’s a breakdown of these functions they can perform:

View the Home Page with Modules Set up by the Accudemia Admin
How much information the student can collect from the home page depends on how much set up the account admin has performed, but here are the available options:

• The College News module can show important information to students about the center or centers participating in Accudemia, on-campus info they need to know about, deadlines, and anything else you want to relay to students.
• If your center is utilizing virtual sign-in stations, you can embed Virtual Sign-in Links to that on the home page. You can also embed media such as Instructional YouTube Videos.
• Students can view their Upcoming Appointments or any messages they have received through Accudemia.
• Each center can have its own section, but be mindful if your account has a lot of them to keep the content limited so users don’t have to scroll too far down the page.
• You can link a Google Calendar to display on the home page. This is great for keeping students in the loop on upcoming events both in and out of your centers. Just make sure in the calendar settings that you share it is set to “public” in the accessibility section.

Student Homepage Example

Make a New Appointment
Students can make appointments through a module on the home page or the “Appointments” option in the main menu. Some centers don’t take appointments, or allow students to make their own, so if yours falls in one of those two categories, you can remove that option from their view by turning it off in the Control Panel.

But if your center does take appointments and allows students to make their own, you’ll just want to make sure you have everything set up!  This can be simple or extensive but is necessary to ensure they can make appointments without any roadblocks.

1. Under the Centers & Classrooms, indicate which Services and Subject Areas should be available at your center.
2. In the Control Panel, review the “Appointments” section for your center. This is the configuration page where you’ll want to make sure all your appointment restrictions and rules are set up the way you want them. For more information about the appointment configuration options, check out our blog post on a Tech Talk from a few weeks back.
3. You’ll then want to set up your Tutors’ Course availability. If your tutors are also students, then usually you’ll be able to find them in the User Accounts list and simply add the Tutor role to each user on their Security tab. If they aren’t already in the system, you can add them by clicking the “New Accounts” button while on the User Accounts screen.  Or finally, you can import them if you have a list of them in a spreadsheet. Once they’re in the system and listed as tutors, you can indicate which courses they’ll be available for each Term/Semester. If you have a large number of tutors, or if your tutors have long lists of courses they can assist with, you can import their assignments as well.
4. Finally, set up your tutors’ availability by setting their schedules for the center. You can also allow them to manage their own availability using options available in the Control Panel. If you have purchased the Outlook 365 Integration for your tutors or staff they can manage their availability from their O365 calendars.

Once you have all that set up, your students are ready to start making their appointments with Accudemia!

Appointments Example

Complete Pending Surveys
If you’re taking advantage of the survey feature in Accudemia, then students will have the option to take any pending surveys they did not complete during the sign-in process when they log into the system. For this, they’ll simply need to click their name at the top right of the screen and select “Pending Surveys.”

Send Messages
If you have the messaging system enabled, one great thing students can do when they log into Accudemia is view their messages and send ones of their own. To enable messaging, go to the User Accounts > Communications section of the Control Panel. Once that’s done, students will see the option to send or view messages at the bottom of the screen.

When sending a new message, they can search for users by name and send a message without seeing the person’s contact information. The recipient will receive the message both via email and within Accudemia, and can respond from either location, though only messages sent through Accudemia will appear in the platform’s inbox.

In addition to email, Accudemia also has a chat feature that users can take advantage of, also through the communications bar at the bottom of the screen. The chatbox will show who of the student’s contacts are currently online, and a user does have to be logged into Accudemia to send or receive messages this way.  There will be a green or red circle to indicate if they are online currently or not.

View Their Own Session Logs
Many centers serve students who may need to view their own Session Logs regularly. Whether it’s because they are required to spend time in that center, or will receive extra credit for attending, or any number of other reasons. With Accudemia, students can log in, view their session logs, and even save or print a report of their logs, without needing to give them access to logs other than their own.

To view their logs, they simply click, “Session Logs” on the main menu. They can also go to the Reports page and view a select number of pre-filtered reports. Again, with the Student role, they will only be able to view their own logs, giving you peace of mind and giving your students the information that they need.

Session Logs Example

If you’ve been wondering about the advantages of allowing students to sign into Accudemia, we hope this article has been informative! As you can see, there are many tasks students can accomplish while logged in. If you have any questions, contact support@accudemia.com and we’ll be happy to assist you!

Engineerica Systems is pleased to present our Tech Tip segment recap for 06/29/2021 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 Thursday, 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/.