How Seton Hall streamlined field experience with Experiential Learning Cloud

Introduction

Seton Hall University, a leading Catholic institution founded in 1856, serves over 10,000 students across more than 90 academic programs. With a broad network of field placements, the university’s traditional system—relying on email and scattered spreadsheets to manage agency partnerships—proved disjointed and inefficient, making it clear that a more integrated solution like Experiential Learning Cloud was needed.

The challenge

To place students with agencies that would be most effective for them, the university had to carry out an extensive and time-consuming process, interviewing students to understand their goals and preferences and then pairing these preferences with agencies as best they could based on the on-hand information that they could maintain about agencies.

Once a student was connected with their agency, even after the agency had accepted that student as a supervisee, it could take days to weeks to complete affiliation agreements so that students could begin their placement experiences. With everything having been on paper, drafts needed to be written up each time, approved, converted to digital forms, sent to the agency, awaited for signature and return, downloaded, signed again, and then filed.

The solution

Following the transition to Experiential Learning Cloud, admins save roughly 50% of their manual processing time. Let’s take a look at two key features of Experiential Learning Cloud that Seton Hall B.A. in Social Work used to streamline and support their program:

Instead of maintaining filing systems with the information about key partners and agencies, with Experiential Learning Cloud, program admins were able to create site profiles where all the information is stored and easily updated. No more sorting through emails or spreadsheets for what services an agency provides, which supervisors and students are working there, or even basic contact information.

Another challenge was the placement process itself—often time-consuming, paper-heavy, and frustrating. With Experiential Learning Cloud, the need to send paper documents, scan files, or manage endless email attachments was eliminated. Instead, placement processes were centralized within the platform, empowering the team to optimize and support their program’s agency placement and coordination.

The results

With Experiential Learning Cloud’s ability to organize students into classes or cohorts, you can assign tasks that are tracked through a grid system, showing progress indicators such as tasks in-progress, awaiting admin input, and completed.

It also allows students to log their hours in detailed time tracks, while both students and administrators can monitor service hours through tools like time approval, time reporting, and the track progress widget.

Continued access to Experiential Learning Cloud means alumni can report hours for state licensure applications and retain access to their past placement data, assignments, and evaluations. Altogether, these features lead to a 50% reduction in manual time spent on processes and provide a single, reliable source of truth for both student and administrative data—enhancing the overall program.