How To Maintain Great Relationships With Externship Sites
It’s difficult to track attendance in externship sites and manual processes can put a strain on the relationship. Improving attendance processes will help your school maintain great relationships with externship sites.
Externships are one of the most critical parts of the learning process. They give students the practical, hands-on experience they need to succeed post-graduation. Many students even go on to start their careers at the site of their externship. Therefore, maintaining great relationships with externship sites is essential.
However, the back and forth communication between school admins and the externship staff to verify student attendance can be frustrating and time-consuming. A damaged relationship could jeopardize your students’ learning and placement, as well as the future of your partnership with the site.
Quit playing phone tag to verify hours
Because many schools choose to track externship attendance on paper time-sheets, it falls onto school admins to verify that student hours are accurate. This is extremely important to ensure students complete their required hands-on learning and verify the accuracy of the data reported to accreditors. The back-and-forth is time-consuming for both schools and externship sites. Continuous phone calls and emails to verify student hours can quickly become frustrating for school staff and irritating for site preceptors. Good relationships come down to good communication. If communication becomes tense, it can be detrimental to the relationship. However, if you can make communication easy or eliminate most of it altogether, site staff can focus on helping students develop skills instead of being bogged down by administrative tasks.
Real-time visibility into externship attendance
CourseKey’s patented GPS attendance technology lets students check themselves in and out of their shifts on a mobile app. Immediately after students check in, attendance data automatically populates real-time attendance dashboards where clinical and externship coordinators can confirm if students have shown up to their sites without calling the site preceptors. Eliminating paper attendance tracking will make it easier to manage student hours and alleviate the pressure on everyone involved.
With a streamlined externship management process, admins can easily manage multiple sites and see their student attendance in their CourseKey dashboard in real-time. As a result, school staff knows immediately if and when a student showed up to their externship, significantly reducing the number of questions the school needs to ask site preceptors. In turn, site preceptors no longer need to spend time going back through paper records, sometimes weeks later, to verify whether a student was there.
Getting your students career ready for successful placement
Attendance automation puts students in charge of their own success. Because gaming the system isn’t possible and time is tracked down to the second, students learn how to hold themselves accountable, which is a huge part of becoming career-ready. These skills are critical for a student’s professional development and will demonstrate to their training site that hiring that student full-time is a good investment. Over time the externship sites will begin to associate your school with high-quality, professional students. Between 30-40% of students are hired by their externship site. Higher placement rates ultimately benefit your school.
Stand out above local competitors
With students using GPS technology to clock in and out, site staff does not need to worry about student attendance data at all. They can feel confident that students’ time is tracked accurately, and they can begin working with at-risk students immediately. At the end of the day, administrative work is probably not the reason why your site preceptor is in their chosen career. Removing administrative headaches of delayed, paper-based attendance tracking allows them to focus on skill development, and your school leaves a great impression. Chances are, other schools in your area are competing for the same externship sites and placement opportunities. If your school eliminates administrative burdens for site staff, you will stick out above your competition and achieve a successful, long-term relationship.
Modernize your attendance process today
CourseKey’s attendance solution helps your school maintain good relationships with externship sites by eliminating unnecessary back and forth communication, helping students become career ready, and alleviating the administrative burden for all parties. CourseKey leaves no room for academic dishonesty and provides both students and staff total visibility into their externship progress. Request a demo to learn more below.
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