Site Placement Start and End Dates

Background

In order for students to be considered "placed" with a site in Experiential Learning Cloud, they need both an association with a placement site, and a supervision rule connecting them with their site supervisor. 

Both their site association and the supervision rule connecting them to their site supervisor contain start and end date fields. It is best practice for the student's placement dates to be entered in both of these spaces. 

 

Site Association: 

Supervision Rule: 

The dates in these two areas don’t always need to match.

For example, a student may be placed at a site for the full year but have one supervisor in the first semester and another in the second.

The placement dates would span the year, while each supervisor’s dates would reflect their specific supervision period.

Why Use Site Placement Start and End Dates?

Any association between a student and their placement site and any supervision rule connecting them to their site supervisor should have a start and end date for three main reasons: 

1. Clarity among students, faculty, and site supervisors
2. Data Cleanliness and Accuracy
3. Reporting

Clarity among students, faculty, and site supervisors

Site placement start and end dates are visible to students and faculty and they determine when a site supervisor will see a student in their list of current supervisees.

Student

A student's site placement dates will always be visible to them through the placement information tab of their widget sidebar. 

NOTE: Students will only be able to track time in Experiential Learning Cloud when they have an active (or "current") placement with a site and an active supervision rule connecting them to a site supervisor. They will not be able to track time if their placement's start date has not yet arrived, or if their placement's end date has passed.

Faculty

The same dates are visible to program faculty in the placement information tab of their widget sidebar when they search for a specific student and in the Placement Information widget in the Student Dashboard when they select a specific student. 

Widget Sidebar: 

Student Dashboard: 

Site Supervisors

Site supervisors will see tiles for their current supervisees on their Experiential Learning Cloud homepage.

Utilizing start and end dates on the supervision rules ensures that supervisors can reliably view only their current supervisees when they log into their Experiential Learning Cloud account.

Site supervisors can always click the Show Archived toggle to view past supervisees, should they need ever need to. 

Data Cleanliness and Accuracy 

By utilizing start and end dates, you can be sure that you have an accurate accounting of which students are placed with each site and supervisor at a given time. 

In the screenshot below, the Students table in the Site Management workspace is automatically filtered to show only the students who have an active association with the site and a site supervisor at the site. 

By clearing the Active filter, you can also see students who were previously placed at this site. 

If placement dates aren’t used, all non-alumni students will appear as currently placed with every site and supervisor they’ve ever worked with, making it impossible to distinguish current placements from past ones, as shown below.

Reporting 

The #801 - Student Site Supervisor Qualifications report displays the sites and site supervisors students were placed with during their field experience. 

If the supervision rule associating the student with their site supervisor includes start and end dates, these will also show up in the report output. If the site supervisor's qualifications have been stored in Experiential Learning Cloud, they will also show up in this report.

BEST PRACTICE: Use this report to demonstrate when each student was in their field experience and that they were paired with appropriately qualified site supervisors during your accreditation visit.

The #802 - Users Associated with Site report displays the users who are associated with each site, their role(s), and the dates during which they were associated with the site. 

How to Implement Site Placement Start and End Dates

If your program uses a site placement process and the student's placement dates are collected on a form in the process, then these dates should automatically be applied to the student's associations with their site and site supervisor once their placement is approved. In some cases, you may need to manually update a student's site placement and supervision dates, which you can do if you have the admin role.

If you manually place students, you will need to manually enter these start and end dates in both the student's association with the site and the supervision rule connecting the student to their site supervisor.

Related Articles

Add a List of Supervisor Qualifications

Field Placement Reports

How to Manually Update a Student's Placement Dates

Manual Site Placement