Time Tracks

Our services team will build and update your time tracks for you. The purpose of this article is to help you understand all of your options when designing your tracks to be built by our team. 

Definitions: 

Track: A track is a list of activities that students will use to categorize their time spent in their field experience. Tracks can also include requirements which help students meet their hours goals. Students may log time in multiple different time tracks over their time in the program as it is common to use different tracks for each field level (e.g. one track for practicum and another track for internship). 

Activity: Track activities are any specific activities or sub-categories into which students' time entries are organized within their track. Parent/child relationships between activities allow sub-totals to be auto-calculated within the track. 

Requirement: Track requirements allow students, site supervisors, and faculty to visualize how students are progressing toward short and long-term benchmarks. 

Timesheet entry: A timesheet entry is an individual entry within a student's time track. Each timesheet entry will display the date on which the entry was logged, the duration of the entry, and the site and site supervisor with which the time was accrued. 

Activity Characteristics 

Every activity on a track can have the following characteristics: 

• Parent Activity: A parent activity functions as a subtotal within a track - it displays the sum of any child activities beneath it. 
  • Child Required: Most parent activities have child activities required - this means that time can not be entered directly into a parent activity, but must be entered into a child activity in order to contribute to the parent activity's subtotal. 
• Child Activity: A child activity is an activity which students enter time into directly. The sum of child activities will accumulate within their parent activity. 
• Descriptions: Adding descriptions to an activity in a time track can have a description which provides further guidance to students.

• Notes: For each activity on a track, you can decide whether notes will be disabled, optional, or required. If notes are required, the students' timesheet entries will not save until a note has been added. 
  • When running hours reports, students can include any notes logged in their timesheet entries. 
• Has Assessments: Enable students to track assessments administered when logging certain activities

Track Requirements

Identify requirements to be built into time tracks to help students understand and progress toward field experience benchmarks.

You can choose from any of the following requirement types: 

• Minimums and Maximums: Enable students to see their progress toward a minimum hours goal or maximum hours limit. Minimum and maximums are always tied to an individual activity, which could be either a parent or a child activity (e.g. minimum overall total hours vs. minimum group contact hours)
  • Minimum / Maximum total hours: Set a benchmark for a minimum or maximum total number of hours logged within a given activity throughout the entire time they are using the track. 
  • Minimum minutes per session: Require that all entries in a certain activity type meet a minimum number of minutes. 
  • Short Term Minimums/Maximums: Enable students to track their progress toward a minimum or maximum total number of hours for a given activity within a specified time range.  
    • Hours per week (weekly requirements always count totals from Sunday to Saturday) 
    • Hours per 2 weeks (bi-weekly requirements always count totals in 2-week periods starting from the first time entry logged in the track) 
    • Hours per month (monthly requirements always count totals from the 1st of the month).
    • Hours per half-year (Half-year periods range from January 1-June 30, and July 1 - December 31). 
    • Hours per year (Annual periods range from January 1 - December 31).  
• Ratios: Enable the track to calculate ratios between two activity totals. Set a minimum or maximum acceptable ratio so that students can see if they are meeting the desired ratio. 
• Overall Activity Sum: Enable students to see the combined number of hours logged in multiple activities compared against a minimum hours requirement.

• Overall Activity Maximum: Enable students to see the combined number of hours logged in multiple activities compared against a maximum hours requirement.

• Overall Minimum Sessions: Enable the students to see a count of all timesheet entries within a given activity to ensure that they meet a minimum count.  

Track Violations: If students have not met a short term minimum or they have exceeded a short term maximum requirement, they will see track violations on the first day of the week or month on their time track. These violations do not prevent students from logging additional time, they are simply meant to notify them that they have not yet met a certain requirement as set out by the program. 

Submitting Track Requests 

When submitting track requests, please keep the following in mind:

1. Let the services team know which activities are "parent" activities and which are "child" activities by indenting child activities beneath parent activities. 

Example: 

• • • Direct Client Contact Hours 
      • Individual
      • Group
    • Indirect Hours
      • Paperwork
      • Case Management 
      • Supervision

2. Provide a list of any activities which should have notes be required or optional.

If you do not indicate that notes should be optional or required, they will be disabled for each activity. 

3. Provide a list of any activity descriptions you would like to include. 

4. Provide a list of any activities which should have assessments enabled. 

5. Provide a list of any requirements you want to include in your track to help students stay on course to meet graduation or licensure requirements.

Track Edits

The following changes can only be made before a track is used by students: 

• Moving activities from one parent to another 
• Removing activities

The following changes can be made at any time

• Rename activities 
• Add activity descriptions
• Add, remove, or update track requirements
• Add new activities
• Start an activity
• End an activity

Advanced Track Features

Once your tracks have been built, you may want to incorporate advanced track features.

 

Related Article

Advanced Time Track Features