Online Site Submission in Sonia

Introduction

Placement Officers can give students and supervisors permission to add potential placement sites to Sonia. Universities with dedicated hosting can also allow an external user (someone who does not have a Sonia Online login) to submit a site for approval. This might be a site in the community that is interested in hosting your students.

Sites submitted via Sonia Online go into a queue for the Placement Officers to vet and approve before becoming actual sites in Sonia. If the site is not approved, a profile is not created for the site in Sonia.

Site Submission Settings

Allowing students and supervisors to submit sites

Activate the permission by going to School Options > Online > General tab > in the Student section and/or the Supervisor section, check the box for “Add sites” > click the Apply button at the bottom right to save the settings.

Custom text instructions

While in School Options > Online, click the Text tab at the top of the page. Click on the tabs circled below to add instructional text to the Site Submission page in Sonia Online.

Submission introduction: appears at the top of the page
Submission notes information: appears above a paragraph area where the user can provide additional information about the site; the custom text you put on this tab might be specific questions for which you need answers in that paragraph text box.
Submitted site feedback: text included in a notification email sent to the submitter and potential site

Note that these fields are rich text; they can include formatting as required.

Activating Notifications

To be notified of sites submitted via Sonia Online, activate the “Site submission” notification in School Options > Notifications > on the Placement Officers tab.

Remember to click the edit pencil at the right and ensure the notification has a Subject line and [NotificationText] in the body. Also remember to subscribe to the notification in File > Subscriptions.

Allowing external users to submit sites

If your instance is hosted on a dedicated server, to allow external users to submit sites, go to the File tab > University Options > Online > in the Home page settings section, check “can anonymous submit sites”.

The “Submission email address” field in the screenshot below (and in School Options > Online – at the bottom of the page) is the email address that will receive a notification every time a site is submitted.

Submitting a site via Sonia Online

Students and Supervisors now see a Site Submission tab in Sonia Online. Here, they have a green “+ Submit a new site” button to submit a new site, as well as tabs to see Draft, Pending, and Closed submissions they have already made.

The “submit new site” page looks like this:

External visitors to your Sonia Online “University” page will see a link (if activated) at the bottom of the page.

Managing Site Submissions

Open the Sites module and click the Submissions tab at the top left.
In the Status field, select ‘Pending’ to just show submissions that are pending approval.
We can see who submitted the site, when it was submitted, and when it was last updated.

Double-click on an entry to open the approval window.

The top of the form (1) is a reminder of who submitted the site, as well as an email icon to send them an email (outside Sonia). At the right is a red flag to create a reminder for follow-up.

In the summary area (2), indicate a Status and Sub-status, Type and Stage.

• Status: options include Active, Rejected, Cancelled
• Sub-status: options include Pending, Needs more info; More info provided
• Type: used to categorize the nature of the application; e.g., Internship, Employment, discipline-specific
• Stage: approval steps; e.g., initial review, legal review, signed agreement

Submission Type and Stage lists can be defined in University Options > Lists.
Status and Sub-Status are built into the process and cannot be modified.
A sub-status of “Needs More Info” will send the submitter an email asking them to revisit the submission and complete more details. Once the form has been resubmitted, the sub-status will change to “More Info Provided”.

The panel at the bottom left of the form (3) shows other sites in Sonia that may be the same as the one being submitted. Sonia checks certain fields (name, address, telephone number, and email address) to see if this is a duplicate site.

Make any edits to this Site details, Primary contact, and Notes.

Once satisfied with the submission, click the Approve button (4) at the bottom left. A wizard will launch to guide you through the final steps for adding the approved site to Sonia.