How the University of South Alabama unified teacher education field experience with Experiential Learning Cloud

Introduction

Field experience programs are a critical part of preparing future educators, counselors, and healthcare professionals, where institutions must carefully track hours completed, field activities, and supervisor observations across multiple accreditor standards. While many colleges have moved away from paper-based processes, experiential learning management can still be cumbersome when digital data is spread across disconnected tools.

At the University of South Alabama, these challenges prompted a shift to Experiential Learning Cloud, formerly known as Tevera. The College of Education and Professional Studies supports more than 2,000 teachers, counselors, and healthcare professionals annually and plays a major role in the region’s educator pipeline. With Experiential Learning Cloud, South Alabama streamlined the administrative side of experiential learning—unifying program tracking, supporting diverse licensure and accreditation requirements, and enabling faculty and staff to spend less time managing systems and more time supporting student learning.

The challenge

Before adopting Experiential Learning Cloud, South Alabama relied on a patchwork of tools to manage experiential learning. Student placement data lived in one system, field evaluations in another, and reporting for state accreditors in yet another. Each program added a new layer of complexity—teaching, counseling, and healthcare all required different standards, parameters, and reporting outputs—and many tools could support only a single type of field experience. As a result, it became increasingly difficult to manage programs at scale.

The result was inefficiency across stakeholders and a heavy administrative burden. With 15+ logins required across the system, monitoring progress and generating reports became slower than necessary, and scaling field experience oversight across thousands of learners demanded significant manual effort.

The solution

Experiential Learning Cloud gave South Alabama one unified system for every student—and every field supervisor—across every program. The platform’s fully customizable interfaces made streamlined experiential learning management possible as each program could be configured to match its own standards and evaluation rubrics, even when those requirements varied by accrediting body.

South Alabama first deployed Experiential Learning Cloud for its counseling program, then adapted it to support a wide range of experiences including internships, externships, practicum experience, and student teaching. That flexibility mattered: instead of forcing programs into a one-size-fits-all workflow, Experiential Learning Cloud could reflect the real requirements of each discipline—while still providing a consistent, connected experience for students, supervisors, faculty, and administrators.

On the front end, students and supervisors could quickly access the app and submit activities and evaluation data without jumping between several systems. On the back end, administrators could monitor progress and generate stakeholder-ready reports far more efficiently—without maintaining multiple separate sets of software.

Experiential Learning Cloud also improved scalability through automation. Administrators could export a spreadsheet of student placement data from internal records and import it into the system in seconds—reducing manual record input and freeing up time for student evaluation and engagement. “We can upload a spreadsheet and do literally hundreds of placements—notifications and all—in a matter of seconds,” said Dr. Binion. “That’s time we get back to dedicate to our students.”

To reduce onboarding load, South Alabama also leveraged Experiential Learning Cloud’s library of on-demand video training materials, giving them the flexibility to learn at their own pace.

Finally, Experiential Learning Cloud made it possible to reimagine experiential learning across the institution—expanding licensure programs into areas
like business and hospitality.

The results

With Experiential Learning Cloud, South Alabama replaced a fragmented software ecosystem with a single platform that works across teaching, counseling, healthcare, and beyond. The shift reduced complexity for every stakeholder: students and supervisors gained a streamlined way to log activities and evaluations, while administrators gained a faster, more reliable path to monitoring progress and producing accreditor-aligned reporting—without maintaining multiple tools.

Beyond efficiency, Experiential Learning Cloud enabled true scalability. By automating data imports and relying on on-demand training resources, the College reduced administrative burden and reclaimed time that would have been spent on manual entry, repeated training sessions, and system switching.

That time can now go where it matters most: supporting student learning, strengthening feedback loops in the field, and maintaining accreditation confidence as expectations rise and programs continue to evolve.