At Cleveland State Community College in Tennessee, all 3,500 credential-seeking students must see an academic adviser before registering for classes each semester. Until this past summer, students used paper sign-in sheets at the Advising Center, then stayed nearby until their name was called.
With the recent implementation of AccuCampus from Engineerica, students now swipe their school IDs upon arrival and get an email or notification on the AccuCampus mobile app when it’s almost time to see their advisor, freeing them to grab a cup of coffee or enjoy some fresh air while waiting.
“Most days the wait was 15 to 30 minutes,” says Michele Houser Wollert, coordinator of Academic Advising and Transfer Articulation. “There were a few days when we didn’t have enough staffing, so it would be longer, but now that we have that information, we can add staffing when we have the most traffic.”
AccuCampus is a cloud-based student tracking, engagement and retention system, primarily used by Cleveland State to eliminate manual sign-ins throughout two campuses and to produce reports on everything from how often a student attends the Math Lab to which courses generate the most requests for tutoring.
Implementation and expansion
The school, which has been using Engineerica products for nine years, piloted AccuCampus in the fall of 2016 in the Math Lab, a supplemental class for students in courses such as precalculus, college algebra and finite math.
“The reporting features were most important to the Math Lab,” says Math Lab Specialist Kimberly Harrington. “It is mandatory for students, so instructors need to know if students attend and how much credit to give them.”
AccuCampus also provides a Math Lab overview, with the busiest times and most popular courses on both the Athens and Cleveland campuses. “It helps us with our scheduling and provides extra data to see where we need to offer more support,” Harrington says.
In the spring of 2017, AccuCampus expanded to the Advising Center and Tutoring and Learning Center, and is also being used at areas such as the Fitness Center and for Campus Events. Additional features—such as trackable referrals and the ability to trigger messages to students asking them to rate locations and services—have also been implemented.
Depending on the location, students either swipe their ID or key in information to sign in. In some places, students can connect via an app, and in all situations the information is synced to the school’s student information system, avoiding problems with the old-fashioned paper and pencil method.
“A lot of times students will receive extra credit for attending a class or event,” Harrington says. “But we might not know they were there if students sign in manually and don’t list their instructor or don’t write legibly.”
The Tutoring and Learning Center uses AccuCampus for record keeping, tracking and generating end-of-semester reports, says Angie St. John, coordinator of tutoring. The detailed reporting shows sessions—including student, date, course and time—for each day of the semester.
“It’s easy to tell an instructor how many of his or her students, or which ones, have come for tutoring,” St. John says.
St. John can isolate locations or select all for a comprehensive analysis. She can easily learn the number of courses tutored and unique students tutored for each course, as well as frequency of student visits. She can view total visits by day or hour.
“This information provides insight into our staffing needs, scheduling, budget and advertising,” St. John says. “AccuCampus has eliminated a lot of extra time related to manual entry of data and formatting cells on multiple worksheets to generate reports. For students, it is easy to log in and out.”
For more information, visit accucampus.com
