Experiential education programs are vital for effectively preparing students for the workforce. Managing these programs can be challenging, and how students and host sites experience your school’s program reflects on your university’s reputation, so a lot is at stake.
Here are three easy ways that you can make managing your placement program easier for you, your team, your students and your host sites.
1. Streamline and Automate Processes
Use a Purpose-Built System That Supports All Disciplines
Wave goodbye to manual placement management with Excel, and unwieldy in-house systems. Software built specifically to manage student placements for all disciplines, like Sonia, makes life easier for everyone involved in experiential learning programs. The user friendly, familiar interface makes it more intuitive to learn and use powers time saving automated workflows, stores data and communications centrally, and enables fast, robust reporting. It’s also highly customizable and flexible, so will meet program needs for any discipline. With a trusted solution in place, you remove risk and open a world of opportunity.
>>Learn More about Sonia. Request a Demo.
Make Reporting a Breeze
In today’s environment it’s essential that you can create robust reports as and when required. Ensure you can easily report on student activity, accreditation requirements and your institution’s management needs. Make sure you have visibility across all aspects of your program’s performance from one central dashboard.
Easily Manage Privacy & Compliance
Manage privacy and compliance risk by going paperless and storing all data in a central, secure database with strong permissions management.
Make sure any solution you use is compliant with necessary regulations and laws. Sonia is compliant with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act 1996 (HIPAA), the Australian Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).
Ensure Stakeholders Are Prepared With Effective, Automated Communication
To provide the best experience, it’s essential that all program stakeholders are aware of what they need to do, and when they need to do it. You need your students arriving at host sites on time, with all mandatory checks and paperwork complete; and you need sites prepared and ready to host your students from day one. Learn how to automate placement communications.
Download Effective Communications whitepaper.
The easiest way to manage this is to use automated communications and workflows – ensuring you are contacting the right people at the right time with the right information – with little ongoing manual management.
2. Centralize Placement Management Systems
When all schools at one institution use the same placement management software, everyone benefits. Students and placement sites benefit from the same high-quality experience, no matter which school is managing the program. It’s easier and more cost effective for IT teams to manage the software. Placement managers across the organization can easily share and learn best practices. Organizations become more efficient, and can effortlessly see institution-wide reports, where information on all placed students is instantly accessible.
If you’re considering a placement solution for multiple schools or for your entire institution, ensure it is flexible and customizable enough to support the terminology and processes that each school requires.
For example, schools of nursing need to support robust immunisation record management and schools of education Working with Children / Police Checks
3. Embrace mobility
With students, universities and organizations forced to rapidly evolve to support new levels of remote learning, working and digital transformation, it’s imperative that placement programs can run efficiently in this new environment.
Make it as easy as possible for your students and university supervisors to access and enter data with a mobile app. Look for a placement solution that offers a complementary mobile app so that students can enter timesheet information, complete forms and receive notifications on-the-go, whether they’re on a clinical rotation, on location completing an internship or attending a class. Look for a downloadable app (rather than simply a mobile friendly website) that stores data on the device, so that students in remote locations with limited or zero internet access can still see their information.
Sonia is the leading software solution for student placement management. It’s easy to use, it powers personalized placements, reliable data management and compliance, and provides the flexibility you need to scale across your organization.
Take your placement program to the next level with Sonia.