TECH TALKÂ SESSION
In Accudemia, Session Logs and Appointments contain vital information about students’ visits and their plans for upcoming visits, but they might tell only part of the story. Accudemia also gives your tutors and support staff the option to enter notes or Session Assessments to provide more information on what specifically occurred during a session, or what is planned for an upcoming appointment. In our latest Accudemia Tech Talk, Senior Support Specialist Nick Armstrong talked to users about how to use these features and how to efficiently pull that information in reports. Watch Nick’s full presentation here or read on for a summary!
Appointment Notes vs. Session Log Comments
Appointment Notes allow either students or tutors to enter information about an upcoming session, with the option to upload documents to accompany the notes. Students can ask questions or let the tutor know more specifically what they want to work on or upload their assignment directly. This can be handy for both in-person and virtual sessions, especially for writing and other similar types of assistance, and many centers use it for asynchronous sessions as well.Â
Tutors often rely on these notes and attachments to review student work and questions in advance. The notes are timestamped to allow a full picture of the communication timeline. Both parties are also emailed whenever a note is added to an appointment.Â
Comments or notes can also be associated with Session Logs, which are different from Appointments because they indicate sessions that have actually taken place, which may or may not be the result of an Appointment. Like Appointment Notes, they’re flexible in how they can be used, but many centers use them to provide additional information regarding what actually occurred during the session. Many users find this data is more valuable than Appointment Notes because it can be tied directly to a student’s visit with a tutor or support person. Documents can also be uploaded to the Session Log which can provide additional context about the visit.
Session Assessments
Unlike notes and comments which are open text fields, the Session Assessment functions more as a survey that can be customized depending on the needs of your center. You can set it to ask any questions, and answers can be provided from a set list (dropdown list or checkboxes), or with open text fields. Questions can also be made either optional or not optional. These responses are filled out by tutors after a session is complete in the Session Log list and can provide valuable, actionable information regarding what went on during the session. By standardizing the questions across all Session Logs, you’ll be better able to compare results from one session to another, even across multiple sessions with the same student.
One caution with Session Assessments is that each center is limited to one Session Assessment survey, so if you have multiple types of services offered within one center license, you may have to keep your questions general and train staff on which questions to respond to depending on which service or services they provide.
Reports
Collecting the data is important, but you also need to be sure it’ll be accessible and reportable when needed. Accudemia makes it very easy to gather reports on all of these notes, comments, and assessments. Reports can be filtered in multiple ways, including by location and date, and can be pulled in a variety of formats such as Excel or PDF.
The Appointment Comments Report, for example, shows you data from scheduled appointments including the student’s name and their appointment time. In addition to the usual data, this particular report will show you any comments associated with the appointment and the timestamp for each comment. It will also show if the appointment has a corresponding visit, if it was canceled, or a no-show, as well as whether the appointment was virtual or in-person.
The Session Comments Report, also known as the Session Log Report, is similar to the Appointment Comments Report in that it shows the meeting data but this report includes any comments made about the actual session. The key difference is that these sessions have actually taken place. Again, it will show timestamps for any comments made during the session.
For Assessment reports, there are a couple of options. The Tutoring Assessment Results Report shows general statistics for any Session Assessments that have been completed. If you need to view the overall results from all of your center’s completed assessments, this may be a useful report, but it will not give you specific results for any one Session Log. For that, you’ll want the Tutoring Assessment Detailed Report, which shows information tied to specific Session Logs for which an assessment has been completed. In addition to the Assessment responses, it shows the student’s information from the session, such as their name and their in and out times. Another report, the Tutoring Assessment Detailed Report with Columns Format, shows similar data but in an Excel column format, where each column shows either a basic detail from the Session Log (such as the student’s name or instructor), or a question from the Assessment, with all rows representing the responses.
Thanks to Nick for this great Tech Talk session. If you’re an Accudemia user using one of these features or reports in a unique way, let us know!
Join us next time!
Engineerica Systems is pleased to present our Tech Tip segment recap for the Accudemia session on 7/12/2022. 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 Monthly Accudemia Session to find out more about our next session and for more ideas about helping our students achieve success!