Accudemia Official Blog

Some of you have been requesting this feature. Accudemia now allows users to view the college shared calendar right on their home page! In order to add the gadget, users just need to click on Add Content and select the Google Shared Calendar: And then, the shared calendar will magically appear:   For administrators, how do I set it up? The first thing you have to do is enable calendar sharing on your Google Account, and get the calendar ID of the calendar you want. You can do it by seeing the calendar settings: Then, copy your Calendar ID and paste it on Accudemia: Control Panel – Announcements – Google Shared Calendar ID. And that’s all! Comment on this post if you need further help on getting your shared calendar ID.

Since today, it’s possible to integrate your site and Accudemia. That means that users won’t need to login twice anymore; once they are on your site, it’s possible to access attendance, appointments, reports and a lot more things with just one click! If you are developer, IT expert or at least you know one, you should check out the Accudemia’s developer resource center. Just click on Advanced – Developers on the menu if you’re a system administrator and you will see documentation, quick start guides for both Accudemia and ADX (our import tool), examples, and much more. You can now have single sign-on across all your institution, including Accudemia. A good point to start is this guide: http://code.google.com/p/accudemiaext/wiki/AccudemiaIntegration You have working examples for ASP.NET and PHP site, and others are coming!

We have created a page in Google Code to include the examples and the documentation of how to extend and customize Accudemia Data Exchange and Accudemia. If you are interested into performing complex task with ADX and Accudemia, just send this link http://code.google.com/p/accudemiaext/ to your IT team. On the other hand, if you are a developer and you have received that link, I’m sorry but you have work to do ;-). It contains the libraries, the examples and the documentation required to extend ADX and Accudemia. You can use plug-ins for example to pull data directly to Accudemia from your own database or management software. Accudemia Developer’s Page: http://code.google.com/p/accudemiaext/

I know it’s not yet available in Accudemia (as of October 8th 2010), but it’s going to be published really soon and I’m a little bit eager to make the announcement!. This time a member of the development team did an excellent job updating the Tutor Schedule editor. I’m not going to publish images at this moment because you have to get a better feeling of the new scheduler. So, stay tuned until next week for the upcoming release of Accudemia, it’s going to save you a lot of time for sure. Tell us what you think!

Our development team have added many new features in ADX (our import tool). Most of them have been requested by users in the past. Honestly some of them have been published the last week, others are completely new. So, here’s an image-driven presentation of the news: 1) Scheduled Import Here you have all the options available by the Windows Task Scheduler: And a powerful set of options to customize when the information is imported: Once it’s everything set, you have the details on the job details tab: (it has 24hs time format due to my PC configurations) 2) Email Notifications when the job fails/success It’s an essential part of scheduled import. As files are uploaded automatically, system administrators must be notified when the information goes out of sync. And there you can select the email addresses to receive the notifications: 3) Instant Get Support Button Now, let’s say the jobs fails… it’s possible even under normal conditions (not sof

We just released a new version of the Accudemia Data Exchange (a.k.a. ADX) app, you can now take a look to the new features it has to offer. The possibility to schedule jobs to run periodically lets you keep all your information in sync. For example, someone from your IT team can export all the updated students information every a couple hours, and then set up ADX to move all that information to Accudemia. To do so, you just have to view the details of a job and hit Enable schedule: You will be prompted to enter a Windows account and password, they will be used to execute the job under that account. So you must enter an user with enough access rights to access the source file. All the options supported by Windows to customize the scheduled job are available. You can also edit the job options in the Windows Control Panel –> Task Scheduler. Either way, you will see this screen to set it up: Hit “OK” and done! Enable Email Notifications One more thing you might want to config

I decided to write a quick step-by-step guide to start using the Referral and Early Alert System (AREAS). I hope it will help you get started with the software in just a couple minutes. In this post everything is done by hand, that means that you are going to have to type all student names, subject areas and all the information you might need. Once you have the whole thing up and running you probably will import all the other information; so I suggest you to start creating one or 2 students, one or 2 instructors, and so on. If it’s the first time you access Accudemia, maybe you went through the initial Configuration Wizard which let’s you setup the basic stuff. In this guide we will verify all the required information is there, and create it if it is not. 1. Create the Staff Accounts: It’s always a good point to start; once you have created the administrator accounts in Accudemia they can help you to setup all the other things. You can do it from the User Accounts menu. Just make su

UPDATE: This is no longer necessary. Go to the Control Panel > Appearance and Themes to update the login instructions. Also, the screenshot shown below does not reflect the actual default page. See updated post. Most users never notice that the standard page shown to access Accudemia is just an example. You can always change the way it looks simply by sending us the new page. Also, it’s possible to stop using that page and have a better integration in your own site. You can put the login frame into your page; let’s see how to do that. You might want to contact the administrator of your website in order to do this, it will be a bit complex if you have never dealt with HTML code. Now, the only thing you have to do is include the following code in your page’s source: <iframe frameborder="0" height="85px" width="190px" scrolling="no" src=" https :// collegename.accudemia.net /LoginForm.aspx?bgColor=%23 FFFFFF &Layout= Vertical &

The new release has included many new features and improvements, one of these is a totally new way of creating appointments. Check out this help video to see how to quickly create a new appointment: You can also filter the results by tutor or subject area, this way it’s so much easier to find the help you’re looking for: The Appointment Wizard is still available under the Appointments menu.

It’s a new feature included in Accudemia, all existent and new users have now access to it by simply clicking on the Referrals menu item. The purpose of this system is to increase student retention by identifying at-risk students and helping them before it is too late. Here is how it works: 1. Create the Early Warning Form The system administrator can create an Early Warning form that will be used by college faculty to issue the warnings. This is a web-based form that can be accessed online by instructors or staff. The System Administrator can create the form with whatever questions they like and indicate who will get a copy of the form when it is submitted. Here is an example of a possible form:   Keep in mind that the above are just example questions and you are free to design the form with whatever questions you see appropriate. 2. Use the Early Warning From Once the form is created, it can be accessed by instructors or other staff online to issue the early warning and help t

We have been working hard in the past months in order to make many improvements to the import process. As a result, there have been many changes in the way you import your files. First, you need to download and install a new tool called Accudemia Data Exchange. It’s currently available only for Windows XP or newer, Linux and Mac OS versions are still under development. Once you download and run the installer, just follow the few steps described there; it will download and install all the required files. You might be prompted to install some missing Windows components you don’t have installed, you have to accept and install those components too. It’s just a couple clicks to accept the installation of all the required components. After it completes, the application will start and ask you to login: The User ID and the Password are the same you use to access Accudemia. The Domain can be the address you use to access Accudemia, or just the first part of it (both will work). For inst

Yes, that’s true! Accudemia 4 was released yesterday and it includes many big changes. First of all, it now includes a whole new product inside: AREAS, which is short form of “Accudemia Referrals & Early Alert System”. It helps college staff to identify at-risk students early, and help them before it is too late. I’ll write more about it later, search for posts tagged AREAS . Secondly, the import tool was redesigned from the scratch to make it easier to use and awesomely faster than before! The good thing is that it’s also simpler for us, and we will be adding many new features in the next week. To get started, read the full explanation on how to install it: New import tools has been published! Also, there’re many small changes and improvements to the existent things. Read the full list on What's New in Accudemia 4.0?

There are many different ways to get that information. The easiest way to look at them is using the Session Log, where you can filter, sort and export the results if you want. If you need a more advanced customization, click on the Reports link under Center Attendance (as shown in the image above). There you will find a bunch of reports, all related to the sign-ins made by students. Visitor History Attendance by Student Attendance Summary Attendance by Tutor Attendance by Subject Area Attendance by Services Attendance by Services (incl. Subject Area) Attendance by Professor Weekly Visits Zero Visits New Visitors Session Comments Traffic Analysis The first 2 reports show the basic information you need. Please take a look to the others if you need to do further analysis. For example, take a look to the information included in the Visitor History report: Hope this how-to post helps you to boost your productivity today!

Many users had been asking for a way to track the student’s attendance to classes. The first thing they tried is to create a shared schedule for many professors or complex things like that. The fact is that it’s really easy to have scheduled classes in Accudemia and track students attendance. To do so, the first thing you need is a Classroom, instead of a Center. Go to the Centers & Classrooms screen and create a new Classroom, as shown in the image below: 1. Then, go to the Subject Areas screen, and either edit an existent one or create a new one. 2. Enable the scheduled classes, and 3. Click on the new “Scheduled Classes” tab you have on the top: 4. Once you get there, create a new class by clicking on the toolbar: 5. Enter the general information as well as the schedule information. If you are editing an existent class, you will see a yellow box with options on what to do with past sessions. If don’t want to enroll each students manually, you can allow them to regi