TECH TALK SESSION
Apart from managing regular daily traffic at student services, event tracking is one of the most common uses of Accudemia. Whether it’s a student workshop, college orientation, or another type of one-time or special event, you can use your Accudemia account to track who’s coming in, and how long they’re staying. You can even have attendees pre-register! Senior Support Specialist Nick Armstrong showed users how to set all this up in our latest Tech Talk session.
Before the Event
Before the event takes place, you’ll want to do a bit of setup. First, create a service that identifies your events by going to Administration > Centers and Classrooms and selecting the Center where the workshop will take place. Under the Services tab, add the new service name. This will be the service used by your event, so it should have a name identifying it as such, such as, “Workshops,” “Events,” or whatever makes sense for your situation.
Next, create Subject Areas or courses that each represent the individual names of the events by going to Administration > Subject Areas. You should set up the event in the location where it will take place. It is not necessary when using this process to give it a particular schedule, but you will want to make sure that students do not need to be registered for this course to sign in for it by checking, “Available to All Students.”
Finally, assuming there will be a tutor or support staff member who will be administering the event, go to Center Attendance > Tutor Schedules. Create a shift on the tutor’s schedule using the Exception schedule for the day and time that the event will take place and assign them to the workshop service and Subject Area for that shift only. If the workshop space can only hold a certain number of students or attendees, set the max attendees in this shift as well. If there is no limit, simply leave that field blank. You can also create a “Events” tutor (in the Administration > User Accounts section of the main menu) if no particular existing staff member will be conducting the seminar or workshop.
If this event is one that students will need to pre-register for, at this point you can advertise to them that they can sign up for the workshop via Appointments. Again, as many students will be able to pre-register as you have set as max attendees for the event time, but if you have left it blank, an unlimited number of students will be able to sign up.
The Day of the Event
Your event is here and whether or not students have pre-registered, hopefully you have many showing up! Now all you need is to track them. As you’re setting up in the event space, designate a computer for the sign-in station just as you would in your normal center space (you can also use iAccu!). Set the kiosk for the location where the event is set to take place and set that kiosk to only display the particular Service and Subject Area for the workshop. When students sign in, they will be signed in for your event! You can have students sign out again when they leave, or if you don’t need to capture the exact amount of time they spent at the event, you can set the sign-in to expire after a certain amount of time so that they only have to interact with the sign-in station one time.
After the Event
Like with all activities in Accudemia, you’ll be able to report on the results of your event. And like all reports in Accudemia, this is easy to see! Any Center Attendance report should give you data that will help you report on your event. Just make sure you filter on the correct Service and Subject area, and the date if necessary, to make sure you are only pulling data for that event.
As you can see, tracking events with Accudemia requires a bit of setup, but it’s very doable and will give you great data that you might otherwise be missing out on! Don’t discount the importance of event tracking; it’s a great way to show the value of the services you provide to students.
Join us next time!
Engineerica Systems is pleased to present our Tech Tip segment recap for the Accudemia session on 2/15/2022. 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 Weekly Accudemia Session to find out more about our next session and for more ideas about helping our students achieve success!
