Referrals and Early Alert System Quick Start

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 sure you add them as System Users; if you are not sure, you can select the College Administrator as the role group:

2. Create a Term/Semester: The second important thing to have in Accudemia is a term (ie, Fall 2010). Go to the Terms menu item, and click Create New on the toolbar. Then enter the basic information asked there and hit Save Changes.

3. Create the Students: They will be needed to create a referral at the end. Follow the same steps described in point 1, but select Is Student instead of Is System User.

4. Create the Instructors: They will be needed to create a referral at the end. The instructor is who usually refers the students, or who creates the alert.

5. Create a Subject Area: You can access this screen by clicking on Subject Areas on the menu, and then clicking on Create New as you did on the previous steps. Enter the General Information and uncheck “Has scheduled classes” if you don’t want to enter all the classes information now.

Select the students enrolled and the instructors assigned before saving changes. You can come back here to enroll more students or assign other instructors later.

6. Create a Referral Template: It contains the form that will be displayed to instructors/staff when the create a new referral, so it’s important to think what questions are you going to ask them. To do so, hit on Referrals Templates and then on Create New:

You will see a default form created, feel free to change it according your needs and then save the template.

7. Done. You’re now ready to start creating Referrals: At this point you have set up all the required things and you’re ready to start using the Referrals and Early Alert System. Now, clicking on the Referrals menu item, you will be able to see all the referrals created. Click on Create New to create a new one:

There you have all the important information you need to complete in the form, including the question you have written in the Referral Template. Take a look:

Hitting Save will let the instructor and the people listed under Recipients know the alert was created.