Features

Placement Coordinator's Home Screen

Managing complex student placements requires the Coordinator to stay on top of a large volume of interconnected actions. The Placement Coordinator Home Screen shows you what needs to be done now.

The Home Screen contains dashboards to show the status of key aspects of the job:

• How many placements have been secured compared to target required?
• How many students have been assigned to places?
• Status of requests to Agencies / Employers for places - how many responded, offered etc?
• What’s happening with payments - to Supervisors, Agencies?

Up to 15 subject organised Widgets that pop into the screen highlighting items that require attention:

• Student has enrolled late and need a placement
• Student has deferred and needs to be taken out of a placement, employer needs to be advised…
• Student has requested a change in a placement, applied for an advertised position, failed to complete the assessment report …
• Student has sourced their own placement and is proposing to add an employer to the university partner register
• And more - you need to do something about it - InPlace will bring it to your attention

Configure the system to suit your way of working - responsible for several disciplines but want to work in just one? Just check the box and all you see from there on is a selected campus / discipline.

Integrated with university systems

InPlace can be integrated into to the university student records system, finance system, email, SMS and Fax servers and timetabling system. Overnight or real time interfaces are supported which create the foundation for a single university wide placement management system, providing an up to date source of information about student work experience placements. 

Integrated systems support accurate reporting and efficient management:

• A student defers and the placement can be reorganised and reallocated
• A payment commitment is processed accurately and on time from its creation in the placement system through to the payment in the finance system
• Students wanting a placement history get the full picture from the one system
• Because the operational process ensures the data sources are integrated and tightly coupled, reporting on Work Integrated Learning outcomes, costs, process activity etc is accurate and timely

Highly Customisable for Universities

InPlace is highly customisable for the University - designed from the start as a generic placement management system, it has many features which enable it to be utilised across all disciplines anywhere in the world.

Key terminology can be configured for the university and faculty.

Data attributes can be created to capture information needed to assign and manage students in placements - check boxes, dates, text, select from lists and more. These attributes can be defined for subjects, faculties or university wide and defined in context for the student, employer and university.

Students can do work placements under many models, for example:

• Self sourcing - finding their own placement and submitting to the university for ratification
• Nomination - university negotiates placement opportunity and opens for student nomination
• Interviews - university arranges opportunity and arranges with employer to interview candidates
• Assignment - university arranges opportunity and works out which students go to which placement

InPlace supports every combination, which can be individually configured right down to the discipline level.

These features and many others enables the university to use one system for all faculties and disciplines.

Rules Based Allocation

InPlace has an allocation function that enables the design of rules (eg: does the student have a police check) and rulesets (groups of rules) to support a highly automated process to assign students to placements. The rules can be based on simple qualification criteria, assignment preconditions or weighted to obtain a relative match between students and placement opportunities. 

Considerations for students may include:

• Distance and/or access to a car/public transport
• Certifications (police Check, Working With Children, etc)
• Requirements of the Placement - particular experience must be offered
• Pre requisites - must complete certain experiences before others 
• No repeats - don’t return to the same employer

For the Agency:

The better matched the student the more likely it is to be a successful placement. Employers might have fixed criteria / pre-requisites for students assigned to placements or might be given the opportunity to express preferences.

Within the Tertiary Institute, students with clashing placement and academic timetables, partial placements and students who are unable to go to certain employers, all add complexity to the process.

InPlace enables business users to create rules on an entirely configurable platform comparing students to agencies for best match. Rules can be based on the data attributes created in the system by the university business users. Rules and rulesets can be shared amongst users and run in test mode to evaluate the proposed matches.

Rule based allocation can save weeks and weeks of manual effort in the university and result in a consistent and demonstrably fair assignment of students to places.

Automated Placement Allocation

The InPlace Placement Manager is the key workbench of the Placement Coordinator. It brings together vacant placement opportunities and students requiring placements to support an automated process for allocating students to places.

In busy disciplines such as Nursing and Teaching, a Placement Coordinator can spend hundreds of hours working out which students should be assigned to which placement. Getting it right is critical - work experience is fundamental to many courses and placing students in unsuitable locations or businesses will often result in a failed placement.

InPlace provides all the tools to get the best match of students to places:

• Several methods are available for allocation of students to placements, from fully automated using tightly defined rules, to drag and drop from lists. An infinite range of criteria can be set up such as geographical proximity, qualifications, immunisations, study preferences to support a better match of student to placement.

• Placement allocation rules can be created, grouped, weighted as to relative importance, saved, reused, shared etc.

• Students can be offered preferences between employers, projects, worksites etc, then those preferences weighted for relative importance against other assessment criteria

• Data attributes can be created to capture data that is important to specific disciplines in the assignment of students to work experience positions. That data can then be referenced in rules created by business users to assign students to places

• Clashes between placements across disciplines are highlighted for resolution.

The user can run a trial match to line up students against places, rerun with different rulesets or adjusted rule weightings, individually assign some students to placements and much more.

Once students have been assigned to positions, the Placement Manager function is used to attach Supervisors, define and manage schedules, add work instructions, add costs (agency, supervisor), notify participants etc - most of the functions to support the university in the management of the student in the placement are available to the Coordinator in this screen.

Data Attribute Creation

Placement management requires many varied pieces of data to be collected and assessed as part of ensuring students are appropriately assigned to placements. Create data elements specifically for your placement process.

InPlace supports business users in creating new data attributes to extend the functionality of the system to capture additional data about the placement process or increase the flexibility of the business process around the definition of placements and allocation of students.

Attributes can be created on a system global level, or for specific disciplines and subjects.

Data Attributes can be created as one of the following types:

• Boolean (Yes/no checkbox)
• Text
• Date
• Time
• Integer
• Decimal
• List Box (select one or more items on a list)
• Combo Box (select one item on a list)

The attributes can then be associated with Agency, Placement, Student, Staff, Request or Scholarship.

The relationship with each of those entities can then be independently defined in terms of:

The data attributes created in the system provide enormous flexibility and power to business users.

• The values can be referenced by user created rules in the allocation algorithm.
• The user reporting tool can utilise the values in reports and data extracts.
• Values can be displayed to selected system users to collect data relevant to the operation of the system or other data capture requirements

Inbuilt Document Repository

InPlace comes with a fully integrated document repository enabling documents of many types to be stored against functional entities in the system.

Managing a student work experience program requires maintenance and sharing of a significant volume of documentation.

• Workplace agreements
• Placement agreements
• Certifications (police check, immunisations etc)
• Student CVs
• Interview reports
• Placement Assessment reports
• Agency Accommodation facilities
• Letters, emails, reports etc

InPlace has an integrated document repository that supports the attachment of documents in many places throughout the system.

Documents can be uploaded directly from local drives by any authorised user, as either scans or in the native document format.

Access can be provided through the InPlace security architecture to appropriate users.

Students can upload CVs to support applications to employers for placements assignments, Placement Agreements can be stored and made accessible by University and Agency personnel.

Rounding up placements - the Trawl

The InPlace Request Manager interface provides a complete toolset to support the process of organising the search for placement opportunities. Using InPlace demand assessment functions the Placement Coordinator calculates the number of placements required for each discipline, then manages the process of creating the required number of places through the system tools provided by the InPlace Request Manager.

• Select the employers / agencies to source the placements
  • Agency Information - level (configurable: ward>network for example)
  • Disciplines and experience offered by agency
  • Contacts or Agency Personnel, potentially different per discipline
    Preferred contact method, etc
• Create new Requests
  • Uses agency records database
  • Against student placement requirement or experience
  • Define required dates, schedule
• Send Requests
  • Methods include online (always) and email, fax or print
  • Preferred method default by agency
  • Configurable MailMerge templates
  • Can be used to confirm agreed allocation
• Response Platform
  • Response platform for tracking and managing issued requests

Student Self Selection

This allocation function enables the staff coordinator to allow the students to allocate themselves on a first come/first serve basis to available placements, before the coordinator accepts/rejects a students nomination. 

The process is tightly controlled such as not allowing students to allocate themselves into a placement clashing in time-frame with another of their placements etc.

The staff coordinator can strictly control when placements are open and available to student self selection. 

One of four options for allocating students to placements including the Rules Based Allocation conducted by the staff coordinator, Student self arranged where the student finds their own placement and an interview/screening requirement for students to be allocated to a placement.

InSight - Survey and Assessment Tool

Whether you are reviewing student’s opinions of their placements or designing supervisor assessment reports for student placement performance, InSight provides the complete answer.

InPlace includes a fully integrated comprehensive Survey & Assessment Tool. Business users can create questions, surveys, campaigns, select respondents from the database and report on submitted responses.

Questions of various types (Y/N, rate on various scales, select from list, select multiple from list, text) can be created and added to a reusable library.

A Survey/Assessment can be created by grouping together a set of questions.

A Campaign is a specific execution of a Survey/Assessment.

Hence the same Survey/Assessment can be run every semester and the results compared.

A campaign target population can be built from the InPlace database - this could be students in a particular subject, discipline, academic year etc, or supervisors, again filtered by the agencies they work at, student disciplines etc. Agency representatives could be selected from the system and surveyed about the efficiency of the placement process.

A Survey could be the Preceptor Assessment Report - a series of questions configured to suit the particular placement and directed to Placement Supervisors for completion by a particular date.

The application is completely flexible and provides powerful reporting and follow up tools to initiate reminders to those requested to respond to a campaign.

Responses can be saved by the recipient as draft and recalled for later completion.