Field Experience Admin Guide

Field Experience Roles

The Field Experience feature uses three built-in and template roles: intern, supervisor, and mentor.

• intern: the student/user who will be assessed.
• supervisor: the institution-based user who will participate in an internship and can complete assessments.
• mentor: the non-institutional user who will participate in an internship and can complete assessments.

NOTE: The names of these roles that users see within an internship can be changed. (See Adding Members to a Field Experience Section.)

Administrative Setup

The basic setup of Field Experience assessments is similar to typical course-based assessments, with a few additional steps required specifically for Field Experience internships. The general steps are:

1. Users are created, including mentors and supervisors.
2. A course is created.
3. A section is created.
4. Users are added to a section as members.
5. Activity templates are used to assign activities to members of a section.

Additional steps required for Field Experience internships are:

1. Sites, site categories, labels, and time log categories are defined.
2. Individual student placements are aligned with a mentor, supervisor, site, label(s), and time log categories.

Building Field Experience Attributes

There are four unique attributes that can be created and used with Field Experience: labels, log categories, sites, and site categories. These attributes are created by selecting the hierarchy node where the Field Experience courses reside and clicking the Field Experience tab.

Labels

Labels are created and then applied to each intern’s placement. Common labels include subject and grade, but there are no restrictions on a label’s content. More than one label can be applied to each intern’s placement.

To create a Field Experience Label:

1. Select the hierarchy node where the Field Experience courses reside.
2. Click the Field Experience tab.
3. Click Label.
4. Click the Create Label button.
5. Type in the name of the label.
6. Click the Create button.
7. Repeat these steps for each label to be created.

Site Categories

Site categories are applied to sites. Common examples include “public school,” “private school,” “hospital,” etc., but there are no restrictions on a site category’s content.

To create a Field Experience Site Category:

1. Select the hierarchy node where the Field Experience courses reside.
2. Click the Field Experience tab.
3. Click Site Category.
4. Click the Create Site Category button.
5. Type in the name of the site category.
6. Click the Create button.
7. Repeat these steps for each site category to be created.

Sites

Sites are the physical location at which each intern’s placement occurs, such as the name of a school, hospital, or clinic. However, there are no restrictions on a site’s content. Only one site can be matched with each intern’s placement.

To create a Field Experience Site:

1. Select the hierarchy node where the Field Experience courses reside.
2. Click the Field Experience tab.
3. Click Site.
4. Click the Create Site button.
5. Type in the name of the site.
6. Select a site category.
7. Click the Create button.
8. Repeat these steps for each site to be created.

Log Categories

Log categories are used by interns when adding time to their time log. The categories allow an intern to document tasks and events, or enter hours under a specific category, which can then be used by administrators in reporting.

To create a Field Experience Log Category:

1. Select the hierarchy node where the Field Experience courses reside.
2. Click the Field Experience tab.
3. Click Log Category.
4. Click the Create Log Category button.
5. Type in the name of the log category.
6. Click the Create button.

Users - Creating mentors and supervisors

Mentor and supervisor user accounts are created using the Import Users function. The ability to import users is reserved for the top-level administrator account. When filling out the users import spreadsheet, supervisors are assigned the role of faculty and mentors are assigned the role of external.

NOTE: Assigning mentors the role of external simplifies their interface by removing the Rubrics and Templates tab from their landing page. The role column on the users import spreadsheet is an account type and is unrelated to template or course roles.

Courses - Creating Field Experience course (internships)

When creating a course to be used with Field Experience, the process is the same as creating any course, with one important difference: it is required that Internship is selected as the category.

Sections - Creating Field Experience Sections

When creating Sections that will be used for Field Experience, the process is the same as creating any section, with one additional option: Log Feature. The Log Feature establishes whether an intern will have access to the Time Log feature, and if they will enter an amount of time and category, or simply a category.

Field Experience instructors

Instructors of Field Experience sections have the same abilities as instructors of regular courses. They can see and manage the status of submissions and assessments, complete rubrics, and edit activities.

Unique to Field Experience instructors is the ability to submit an activity to the system in lieu of the mentor or supervisor completing rubrics. This is especially useful when, for example, the supervisor completes their rubric, but the mentor does not. By default, the activity will be incomplete and remain visible until the mentor completes and submits their rubric. However, an instructor can complete the activity by submitting it to the system, the mentor’s rubric will remain incomplete, and the activity will no longer appear as open to the intern or supervisor.

Also, while creating intern placements by matching intern, mentor, and supervisor is often done by an administrator, Field Experience instructors can also create these placements.

Membership - Adding Members to a Field Experience Section

Section membership defines all the users that will be part of a section. For Field Experience sections, members include interns, supervisors, and mentors. There are two ways to define members of a section: by manual process or by the membership import.

NOTE: Before being added as a member of a section, users must already have been added to the system using the Users import. (See the Creating mentors and supervisors section.)

Importing members

Membership import file

Importing users as members requires the use of a spreadsheet file. There is a sample file available that includes the required headers and provides examples of correctly entering the user information.

To access the membership import sample file:

1. From within a course, click the Create Section button.
2. From the Create Section popup window, click the Sample File button, which will expand the window.
3. Click the members.csv link to download the sample file.

NOTE: It is not necessary to create a section when downloading the sample file. Once the sample file is downloaded, the section creation can be canceled.

The membership import spreadsheet requires three fields to be populated:

• Name: The first and last name of the user to be added to a section.
• User ID: The user ID of the user to be added to a section. The user ID is the unique value that identifies a specific user, which means the user ID must be correct and match the user name for the import to succeed.
• Role: The name of the role under which each member will participate. These names should reflect the naming used at your institution, and will be correlated to one of the built-in roles (intern, supervisor, mentor) during the matching process.

Once the membership import file has been created and populated, there are two ways to import the file into Student Learning and Licensure: during the creation of a section, and after the section has been created.

Importing members during section creation

If the membership import file is already prepared when creating a section, you can import the file during the section creation process.

To import members during the section creation process:

1. From the Create Section popup window, fill in the Section Name, Instructor, Term, Start Date, End Date, and Log Feature fields.
2. Click Enroll Members.
3. Your computer’s file browser window will appear.
4. Browse to your membership import file, and click Open.
5. Click Save on the Create Section popup window.

Importing members after section creation

Once a section is created, its membership can no longer be imported using the Create Section window. Instead, the file can be imported on the section's settings page.

To import members from the section's settings page:

1. From the list of sections, locate the section into which members will be imported.
2. Click the settings button (GEAR icon) under the Operations column.
3. Click the Members tab.
4. Click Enroll Members.
5. Your computer’s file browser window will appear.
6. Browse to your membership import file, and click Open.
7. After verifying your imported members are correct, click the Save button on the Enroll Members popup window.

Correlating imported roles to the built-in roles

When a section's membership is imported, there is an additional step required to correlate each of the member roles created in the import file with one of the built-in roles (intern, mentor, and supervisor).

To correlate an imported role with a built-in role:

1. On the settings page, click the Members tab.
2. Locate the first role.
3. Select the edit Edit icon.
4. In the Edit Role popup window, select the correlating role from the dropdown menu.
5. Click the Save button.
6. Repeat these steps for each of the imported roles.

Once a role has been correlated to a built-in role, the built-in role will be shown as a colored indicator next to the role name.

Adding members manually

Members can be added to a section manually, but first, the member roles must be created.

To create a member role manually:

1. On the settings page, click the Members tab.
2. Click the Create Role button.
3. On the Create Role popup window, type in a Role Name. This should be the name used at your institution.
4. From the dropdown menu, select a built-in role to which your custom-named role will correlate.
5. When finished, click the Save button.

To add members to a role manually:

1. On the settings page, click the Members tab.
2. Locate the role to which members will be added.
3. Select the Add Member icon.
4. From the Add Member popup window, select the user to be added as a member from the dropdown menu.
5. Click the Save button.
6. Repeat these steps for each member to be added.

Activity Templates - Creating activity templates for use in Field Experience

Creating an activity template for use in Field Experience is the same as creating an activity template for course use, with one important difference: When choosing a workflow for the activity template, the internship workflow must be selected.

IMPORTANT: The internship workflow MUST be selected in order to use the template in Field Experience.

To select the internship workflow when creating an activity template for Field Experience:

1. Be sure to select the appropriate hierarchy node in which to create the activity template.
2. Click the Create Template button.
3. On the Create Template popup window, type in a title for the activity template.
4. From the Workflow dropdown menu, select an Internship Workflow.
5. Click the Next button.

Assigning ownership of an activity template component

Just as with course-based activity templates, the components of a Field Experience template can be assigned to a specific template role. In addition to the Instructor role, templates that have been created using the Internship Workflow allow the Mentor and Supervisor roles to be assigned to components as well.

NOTE: Just like course-based templates, components added to the Assessment Panel area of the template cannot be assigned to students/interns. To allow components (including rubrics) to be assigned to interns, the component must be placed in the content area of the template.

To assign a role to a template component:

1. Add a component to the activity template.
2. From the component options popup, select an owner from the dropdown menu.

In the illustration below, a rubric component has been added to the content area of the template.

Adding Log Categories to Field Experience sections

After creating the master list of log categories, specific log categories are added to a Field Experience section to make them available to the section’s interns. This is useful when only some of the created log categories will be used by interns in a section.

NOTE: Adding log categories to a section is required for interns to be able to use them in log entries.

To add specific log categories to a Field Experience section:

1. From a Field Experience section list, click the Log Categories tab.
2. Click the Insert Log Category button.
3. From the Add Log Category popup window, click the checkbox next to each log category that will be available to interns. The selected categories will appear on the right side of the popup window.
4. When finished selecting categories, click the Save button.

Matching - Creating intern placements

Once roles, members, and sites (and optionally labels and log categories) have been created, the final step is to create the placement. Creating a placement matches an intern with a site, mentor, supervisor, and makes the placement active in the section.

To create a placement and match interns with mentors and supervisors:

1. From the settings page, click the Members tab.
2. Click the Edit button (Pencil ICON) for the intern that will be matched.
3. On the Edit popup window, select a mentor, supervisor, and site from the dropdown menus.
4. Select all applicable labels from the label dropdown menu. Multiple labels can be selected.
5. When finished, click the Save button.

Activities - Creating Activities for Field Experience

Creating activities for a Field Experience section is identical to creating activities for course-based sections. However, be sure to make the matches of intern, mentor, and supervisor before creating an activity to ensure each role has access to the activity.