TECH TALK SESSION
February’s Accudemia Tech Talk took place on Valentine’s Day this year, so in honor of that, Senior Support Specialist Nick Armstrong focused on ways you can show Accudemia some “love,” by changing the look and feel of your Accudemia account to something that makes sense for your institution and center. Click here to view Nick’s full presentation, or read on for a summary!
Login Page
If your account isn’t using SSO, you can customize the look of your Accudemia login page to make it more aesthetically pleasing, and help students understand what they’re signing into. To customize this screen, go to Administration > Control Panel > Appearance and Themes, and set the scope to the college or institution level.
Here are some of the things you can customize:
- College Name: Normally, you’d want to keep this as your actual institution’s name, but if your account only has one center, you may want to consider changing it to your center’s name, so students understand what specific services they can receive through Accudemia.
- Welcome Instructions or Message: This can include formatted text and images. In his presentation, Nick even showed attendees how to code a background image. Yours doesn’t have to be complicated to look nice, but if you know HTML, you can utilize it here!
Homepages
Using the same path as above to get to Appearance and Themes, now head to the section, “Homepage Widgets.” These customizations can be set at either the center or institution level. Most widgets are only available for Institutional licenses, but all accounts have the option to customize their home screen with things like announcements and calendars.
You’ll be able to adjust the visibility of the different widgets by user type, so if, for example, you’d like students to see some widgets but not others, you simply check the boxes corresponding to each widget in the student column. Note that some widgets are only available for certain user types.
Users can adjust which version of the homepage they see by selecting available locations from the drop-down menu on the top right. So if your account has more than one center, and each one has different information they want to display or make available, students and other users will be able to easily toggle between those views.
If you have an Accudemia Lite license or above, you’ll be able to display news and announcements on your homepage. Go to Administration > Control Panel > Announcements to edit the customizable fields for the homepage.
In this section, you can add a title or introductory text, a teaser that appears on the screen before the user clicks, “View Full Article,” and the welcome text, which is a customizable field that contains whatever relevant information you’d like students and other users to know.
Kiosk
The kiosk is the screen that students and tutors use to sign in to your center for their attendance to be counted. You’d typically want this to be customized at the center level since each center will likely have different policies and preferences for how students sign in and what information is collected.
To customize the kiosk, go to Administration > Control Panel > Appearance and Themes, and then select your center from the drop-down menu. From there, navigate to the section, “Sign-in Station Screen.”
One decision you’ll want to make on this page is the type of header your kiosk will use. “Full content” allows you to design and customize the header yourself and include information about your center and other features such as images. “Logo only” will display only the logo uploaded in the “Update Logo” field. Note that this does not necessarily have to be your institution’s logo! If your center has its own logo (or if you want to have one designed for you), this can also be the logo you display.
You can also choose to include card reader instructions, which we do recommend if your kiosk is attached to a card reader. This helps students understand how to use the device if they have never used it before, and what to do if they don’t have their card with them.
You may notice buttons at the bottom of the kiosk screen such as one that allows users to see students signed in, or one that can add new students. For obvious reasons, you probably won’t want all of these buttons to display on a student-facing kiosk. To disable these buttons, go to Administration > Control Panel > General. Select your location and navigate to, “Sign-in Station Settings.” This will allow you to disable or enable any of the bottom buttons, as well as decide whether to display the student’s ID number while they are typing.
Thank you to Nick for showing our users some ways to make the Accudemia experience more unique for their centers! If you would like to learn more about the different processes he discussed, be sure to watch his full presentation. We hope to see you at the next Accudemia Tech Talk!
Join us next time!
Engineerica Systems is pleased to present our Tech Tip segment recap for the Accudemia session on 2/14/2023. Held Tuesdays at 1 pm EST (weekly during the academic year, and monthly during the summer), 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. Check the page about our Monthy Accudemia Session to find out more about our next session and for more ideas about helping our students achieve success!