Accudemia Official Blog

Here is a new feature that allows your center to give a better service and increase the quality of your support team! With this new feature all users in the system, that are logged in to their homepage, can now contact the center/college administrators to get information or help about the center activities or anything they want. To do so, they have to click on ‘Contact center administrator’ in the navigation bar… And this new screen will be shown… The logged-in user’s e-mail address and phone number will be automatically loaded (if set in the user’s profile). Then the user can enter his message and click ‘Send’. Ok… So where does this message go? Good question! This is automatically sent by e-mail to the center administrators’ e-mail addresses loaded in the Control Panel. You can set/change these e-mail addresses by going to Control Panel->Web Site Settings->User Accounts->Communication.

This is definitely a great week for Accudemia, it’s the 3rd update we've published! This time the update was to make data administrators’ lives easier.  Whether for software security or licensing purposes administrators have to deactivate students that are not longer in the current enrollment data for the semester.  If you have a list of active students, now you can check this checkbox option in the Accudemia Data eXchange (or ADX - our import tool) that will inactivate any student that is not in that import CSV file.  This option states “Inactivate students not being imported” and is disabled by default so that you'll have to enable it to use this feature. As an example: In the first import CSV file for the semester you have four students (A, B, C and D) and you upload it to Accudemia all those students will be active. And the next CSV file you’re uploading only has A, C and D which will keep them active. The end result using this option will have B become inactive

Hey Folks, we have another new feature here in Accudemia!  In case you haven’t read it, yesterday we have published new features for appointments.  It is possible to schedule recurring appointments for example, or assign a random tutor to each appointment.  Check the details here if you haven’t yet. Today, we also have added the possibility to have 2 IDs per student.  That way, if a student has ID 123-45-6789 , but her card has another number, such as ==SMITHJ123456789/= or whatever, you can let students either swipe their card or type in their student ID number. To do so, you must first enable the “Alternate ID support” in the Control Panel.  You can find that option under the User Accounts section. Once you have done that, go edit a user and you will see a new field under the User ID that was already there. This will also disable the ID mask in the sign-in station.  However, if you type an ID without the masking chars (eg., 123456789), it will still find the user with ID 123-45

Accudemia let users schedule recurring appointments now. To do so, please go to Center Attendance->Appointments->Wizard and follow the steps. Following the steps you’ll get the next screen: In this screen you can select all the reservations you want by clicking over the green (available) slots or you can click on “Add Recurring”. If you do the latter you’ll get the next screen where you’ll define the recurrence options. After you click “OK” all the reservations that match with the criteria will be selected. An example of this is shown in the next image: Click “Next” to save your reservations and make the corresponding appointments. Hide tutors’ names to students when they make appointments: To do this, please go to Administration->Control Panel->Tracking Settings->Appointments->Select the college as the scope, and check the “ Hide tutors’ names from students when they make appointments ” option under “ Tutors load balancing ”. Don’t forget

There is a feature added to Accudemia that not too many people may know about and it is the ability to generate badges or labels for your students in Accudemia. To do this simply go to the Administrative section on the left-side navigation of Accudemia and click User Accounts >> Students . If you notice at the top of the screen you have a Print Labels button.  The Print Labels button if pressed now will generate labels for all of you students.  However if you want to only generate the badges/labels for only several of the students you can enable multi-select and select the students before pressing the Print Labels button. This feature can be used to generate labels for Instructors, Tutors, and System Admins as well. Once the Administrator clicks the Print Labels button and accepts the confirmation, he or she will get a PDF containing all the requested labels. The PDF contains up to 24 square labels per page. We suggest Avery® Easy Peel® White Square Labels (#22805) that

Many people don’t seem to be aware of one incredible feature that Accudemia has.  If you tutor in the cafeteria or somewhere else where there’s no a sign-in station available, you can add sign-in sessions manually later.  Well, to be honest, the best way to do it would be with iAccu, using an iPhone you can create the session even with no Internet connection.  But let’s imagine your cell phone battery is dead or you just want to do it later. First of all, an administrator must allow tutors to manually sign-in and sign-out students.  Those options can be found in the Control Panel, under the User Accounts section: Once that option is enabled, the tutor can login to her account, go to Sign-In/Sign-Out in the left menu and create the session(s) manually in a few clicks: There you have to select the center, the start time and duration of the session, and optionally the course, instructor and services you helped with.  Then select the student names and click in the big blue button o

Don't be intimidated by the seemingly daunting task of creating and easy way for your student, tutor, and admins to login to Accudemia via your school's portal.  It is far easier than it may seem.  As a support person here at Engineerica I noticed this feature is something that schools want to offer their users but are afraid to get started or maybe do not know where to do so.  Here we will go through the process of implementing SSO (Single Sign-On) easily for your institution. Several Pre-Requisites You will need access to place hyperlinks into your webpages and create webpages/add files to your school's portal .   Usually this can be done via the Web Development Specialists at your school who can modify the files directly on your web server.  Others will need their privileges to be elevated on the school's portal or website so they can create/modify webpages on your school's website via a web-based WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) editor . You will ne

Today we wanted to show you how you can quickly set up the tutor schedules. It only takes a few steps and you can use this to restrict the course availability based on tutors availability.  Here's how:   1. Go to Tutors Schedule in the left-side navigation menu under Center Attendance and enter the information (Tutor Name, center, etc):       2. Then click the Apply button   3. Next click and drag the mouse to create a block in the calendar:     4. Enter the information for the selected time:     When assigning a schedule to a Tutor you have Availability Statuses such as Available (Green), Not Available (Red), Not Working (gray/shaded), Working in Another Center (Maroon) and Cleared (white/clear).   5. And click the Save button.       Hope it helps! 

This will be useful info for IT admins only, others might find it uninteresting.  You have been warned. ;-) Today, we have made a few changes in ADX (Accudemia’s import tool) and in Accudemia.   The most important change is that the CRN and Class Name no longer have to be unique across semesters.  Those 2 fields still need to be unique only within the same semester. That means that you can import a class with the same name, the same postfix, the same Registration Number and the same schedule in 2 different semesters. Please note the following things: The Class Short Name still must be unique for the semester.  That means that you cannot have 2 classes named “MAT-101 -  Intro to Math”.  This is mainly to allow users who don’t have a CRN to import only the class names. ADX will be updated the next time you open it. If you want to import data for a semester that has not started yet, then you need to a “Semester” column with the name of the semester you want to import the data to.

We are glad to announce the addition of a new tool for Accudemia users.  Now tutors can evaluate the tutoring sessions by completing a questionnaire. To use this feature, click on Tutoring Assessment Forms in the menu and click on Create New.  Build the form to ask the questions you consider important.  You can even create different questionnaires for different centers; select “Center: All” to be used as a default for all centers, select a specific center to be used only there.  Note that you need admin permissions to complete this first step. That’s all the configuration you need.  Now you can access the form from the Session Logs screen or from the Intake System.  In the first you have a button on the toolbar to complete the questionnaire, in the latter you can access this feature when signing-out a student. We also have added 2 reports:  Tutoring Assessments and Tutoring Assessments – Detailed.  Find them under Center Attendance –> Reports, in the menu.  With those reports y

Today a customer came with a good question.  He was trying to calculate tutor payments from a student visit report.  However, if you export the report in Excel format, you will get the Period in HH:MM format: To calculate the total hours and the total payment amount, you will need to use the TIMEVALUE Excel formula . For example, the following will return the total hours worked: =TIMEVALUE([Cell])*24 Then you can, round that number to have only 2 decimals: =ROUND(TIMEVALUE([Cell]) * 24, 2) For example, if the tutor has worked for 1 hour and 30 minutes (that would be displayed as 1:30), you will get 1.50 hours using the formula above. Or you can multiply the total hours worked (not rounded) by the hourly pay rate and then round the final amount.  If it were $20, then the final formula would be: =ROUND(TIMEVALUE([Cell]) * 24 * 20, 2) Being [Cell] the reference to the cell where the period is (eg, 01:30), and 20 is the hourly pay rate.

As a support tech, you receive several times the same question.  This is about one of those things that many user usually forget: courses are not available by default to all centers.  When you create a new center, you need to assign the subject areas that can be taught in there. The same happens when you create a new subject area. To solve the problem, you need to import a file with 3 columns: Center Name, Subject Area Code Prefix and Subject Area Name. For example: Center Name Subject Area Code Prefix Subject Area Code Math Center MAT 101 Math Center ALG 201 Writing Center HIS 101 … … … And so on. In this case, MAT-101 and ALG-201 would be assigned to the Math Center and HIS-101 would be assigned to the Writing Center. If you want to assign all subject areas to all centers, you might want to use the export feature to get the list of subject areas.

We are glad to announce that Accudemia has received the Readers’ Choice Top Product Award. Accudemia has been selected as the University Business 2013 Readers’ Choice Top Product. AccuTrack and AccuSQL, two of Engineerica’s other products, received an honorable mention.  Other award winners for 2013 include products by Apple, Amazon, Adobe, and Cisco. The award is based on nominations from campus leaders from across the US. Winners are selected based on both the quantity of nominations and the quality of testimonials describing how these products are used to astreamline operations and enhance student’s experience. UB included this sample nomination for Accudemia: “Accudemia has helped streamline our tutoring services. We are more efficient as a result of using this product and have had great success with their tech support. Accudemia also allows us to track data and statistics on our usage in a very user friendly way and without any delay.”        — Zoraya Betancourt, Assistant Direc

Most of you will need to copy semester information to start the new year. Here's a quick guide on how to copy Tutor Assignments from one semester to another: There are 2 ways to do that: 1) To copy only a couple of tutors:    - Go to User Accounts -> Tutors    - Select the user you want (or click on "MultiSelect" to select more than one tutor)    - Click on Assignments    - Click on "Copy assignments from another term"    - Select source and destination terms and click Accept. 2) To copy several tutors at once:    - Go to Advanced -> Export    - Click on "Tutor Assignments" to export all the tutor assignments.    - Delete the columns "Tutor Name" and "Subject Area Code"    - Sort the data by "Semester" and remove the records from old semesters (only keep the data from the semester you want to copy from)    - Change the semester column to the new semester. For example, rename all Fall 2013 with Winter 2014.    - Re-i