Table of Contents
Making the Match between Student and Site
Learning Activities Completion and Review
Continuing Education Notifications
Training and Education
If you are an Exxat client, learning to use Exxat Prism, is an integral step. It may seem like an overwhelming task but rest assured that we have plenty of resources to help you along the way.
We host regular trainings, both in person and virtual. Our annual all user conference, Cohere, brings together hundreds of users from across professional disciplines and across the country for 2 days of best practices, brainstorming and training on new functionalities. Smaller group trainings, known as Cohere-X Workshops, take place throughout the year and offer trainings at host universities across the country. Registration to Cohere-X workshops is always free, and all you need is your laptop and your list of questions to get started on your journey to becoming an expert in the day-to day use of Prism.
Visual learners will love our YouTube channel – Exxat - with video tutorials and recordings of past webinars. For those who prefer written instructions, the Exxat Help Center is here for you with hundreds of documents detailing workflows and answering commonly asked questions. For more in-depth requests, our support team is only an email away and can be reached by emailing v4support@exxat.com or by utilizing the question icon within the system.
Resources:
While curricular design may change from program to program, the student interface of Exxat remains largely constant. Students at academic institutions who utilize Exxat Prism will benefit from the Student Orientation Video Playlist to walk them through the basics of creating their profile, expressing preferences, and providing required documentation for clinical experiences.
Resources:
Student Orientation Video Playlist
Logging In and Dashboard
Before you can begin using Prism, you’ll need to get added to the system!
When it comes to accessing Prism, users can create a unique password or use Single Sign On to access the system using you school credentials.
If you are using Single Sign On, our support team will activate both school and student accounts on your behalf.
If you are not using Single Sign On, you will receive an invitation to set up your account.
Resources:
Terminology Comparison V3 to Prism
Setup and Student Profile
The first decision you will make is how you want to group your students, by graduating cohort is one of the most popular answers. You will add in cohorts, enrollment, and graduation details and will have the ability to easily categorize and add campus information within the system should you need it.
Aside from entering in student information, you can easily add specifc information for your students to access, review and to set them up for success:
- Add relevant Announcements for them to view upon login
- Share Resources related to your program and their education
- Add Attestations they will have to sign and agree to
- Include Program Requirements they must complete prior to completing the program.
- Create a questionnaire for your students to answer via Additional Profile Details
- Decide if specific features should display on the Student View
Once you have your student details available, you can easily bulk import your student list, and send them invitations to access their accounts on Prism. When it comes to accessing Prism, users can create a unique password or use Single Sign On to access the system using their school credentials. If you are using Single Sign On, our support team will activate both school and student accounts on your behalf.
Your students will then complete their profile, and you will be able to review their information, and store additional details for reference.
Aside from adding and setting up your student information, you can also add program information within the system.
While items like general details, mission and vision, accreditation information and your grading scale will only be stored for reference, there are a few items that are key:
- Adding a master list of Terms will come in handy at a later point when adding course offerings
- Adding Professional Years will assist with creating course offerings
- Creating a Program Clinical Settings list will assist with not only providing your students with a list of areas they can mark interest in on their profile, but also will be utilized when adding slot information
Resources:
Managing Enrollment & Graduation Calendar
Setting Up Student Announcements
Setting Up Student Attestations
Setting Up Student Program Requirements
Setting Up Additional Profile Details
Student Cohort Movement or Update
Single sign on Student Invitation (SSO)
Associating Faculty & Staff with Students
Compliance
Your program may have a number of medical clearance forms that it requires students to have on file. Your Sites may also require these documents in order to accept a student for a placement.
For each cohort, you will setup the compliance items you would like to collect, and once enabled your students will upload all required items. You will then have summary grids and reports to help you review and approve them.
In addition to the out of the box Compliance management, Exxat offers a service to assist with this process, Approve. Approve is an add-on service where our team gathers your requirements, sets up your items to be collected, and reviews items students upload based on your guidelines of approval.
Resources:
Setting Up Compliance Requirements
Setting Up Auto-Notifications for Compliance Requirements
Viewing the Compliance Dashboard
Reviewing Compliance by Cohort
Sending Compliance Notifications
Tenant level app for Compliance View
Once students have access to Prism, they will begin to complete their profile (which can be shared with Sites) and upload any necessary compliance items. To get familiar with what your students see, you can easily do this by using the View As feature when looking at any single student profile.
As a school user, you can review student information and will be able to add additional details to their profiles:
- Update information such as
- Enrollment, Graduation, status, academic standing, group, campus, categories, and tags
- Indicate any program requirements that have been completed
- Associate staff and faculty
- Review their completed profile which can be shared with Sites
- Review Compliance items submitted
- Log any Communications you have with the student
- Add Interventions whenever any issue arises
- Review a history of all their placements via Clinical Coursework
- Review completed Learning Activities
Resources:
Reviewing Compliance by Student
Managing Student Communications & Interventions
Viewing Students Clinical Coursework
Reviewing Learning Activity by Student
Student Reports and Dashboards
Prism allows you to view information in multiple ways, whether that is a report or a dashboard with graphical representations.
Resources:
Faculty and Staff
We know that managing the day-to-day tasks is a team effort, and you don’t have to manage it alone.
You can easily add faculty or staff members and provide them with access to Prism so that they can manage any courses, or students they are associated with.
Faculty and Staff will have access to limited parts of the system, and some are dependent on a system administrator providing them with the right access.
You can associate them with:
- Courses
- Students
- Placements
If Faculty and Staff are not associated with the items above, they will not have access to necessary information on their end.
Resources:
Adding & Inviting Faculty and Staff
Setting Up Faculty Announcements
Sites and Locations
Your sites are the lifeblood of your program. As such, you will want to have a good amount of information regarding your sites organized and at your fingertips. Some of this information may also be helpful to students for the purposes of researching sites at which they are interested in completing a placement.
Within Prism, we have a Site and Location relationship. A site is the group or entity with which a contractual relationship is established. A Site is a common entry from which information may be disseminated to a location.
A Location is best described as an address or associated with the site. This is where patient care takes place, and students will always be placed at a location.
As you build new partnerships, you will need to update your database. Within a Site and Location profile, you’ll be able to add contracts, list requirements, any clearance documents students have to complete prior to a placement, settings usually offered, categories, documents, and notes.
You can also log additional information:
- View and add Slots as necessary
- View Placements you have made
- Log Interventions when issues arise
- Complete Assessments, during a placement or at any point in time
- Track important Communications
Resources:
Understanding Site vs. Location
Tagging Sites, Locations and Personnel
Managing Site Student Requirement Uploads
Adding Slots by Site and Location
Viewing Placements by Site and Location
Managing Interventions for Site Location and Personnel
Moving Location from one Site to another
Managing Assessments for Site and Locations
Managing Communications for Site, Location and Personnel
Viewing Site, Location and Personnel Reports
Managing Site Resource Page (Public Website)
Courses and Rotations
Prism is built around the concept of Courses. This allows the system to be organized around a course number, term, and academic year, mirroring the organization utilized by academic programs.
A Course is what a student enrolls in. It is a stand-alone element that can be used time after time.
Once you have your courses created, you’ll then create a Course Offering, which will allow you to add in the actual dates of when the course is offered, known as a Rotation.
You’ll be able to update course details, measures, attributes, add resources for students and sites to access, along with activating learning activities for courses which require a placement.
Resources:
Understanding Course vs. Rotation
Managing Course Measures at Mapping Level
Managing Student's Communication and Intervention through Course Offering
Managing Attributes at Mapping Level
Adding Courses to Course Catalog
Adding & Editing Course Offerings
Managing Course Event Schedule
Manage Student Course Registration
Reviewing Student Compliance by Course
If a course offering will have placements, you will have to set up the items you will want your students to complete in the duration of the placement. This can be any of the following:
- Have students upload Assignments. These will be file uploads.
- Have students complete Forms / Evaluations directly within Prism. These can be student assessment of the placement, self-evaluation, etc. Depending on your discipline, you may have standard forms available ready to be used on day 1, but you can also build any forms your team has created as well by contacting our support team
- Track patient encounters via Patient Logs
- Track time spent in clinic via Timesheets
- If your program allows students to request time off, keep track of any requests via Time Off
Resources:
Managing Course Activities - Forms and Evaluations
Managing Course Activities - Activating Assignments
Managing Course Activities - Activating Patient Logs
Managing Course Activities - Timesheets
Managing Course Activities - Time Off
Mapping and Reports
Your program may create curriculum grids to easily track the academic trajectory or progression for a group of students enrolled in your program. If so, you will connect objectives and measures to accreditation standards, program goals, and more. With the assistance of reports, you can also find gaps and ensure even coverage of content.
Resources:
Editing and Deleting Curriculum
Slots and Slot Requests
Gathering slot availability is an ever-evolving landscape. Forming and maintaining a strong working relationship with a well curated group of clinical sites who know you and your program’s curriculum well will ensure that you have quality placements, not just quantity.
In order to gather slot availability, you can send a Slot Request for Site users to easily add slots directly onto the system. Sites do not need a login; they will receive an email which contains a link for them to provide a response.
In addition to requesting slot availability, you can also send a request for Sites to update their site information on a regular basis.
Slot Request + Update Location Information
While you can send communications for either of these activities as standalone notifications you can combine them into a single email, making it easier for Sites to respond to both all at once!
As sites begin to add slot availability and update their site information, you can review what they have offered using our email dashboard, and response and slot reports.
Some sites may choose to share slot availability outside of Exxat, and you can easily add that information on their behalf.
Sites may provide slots to your program that require quick action. Whether it is a First Come First Served slot, or one that requires an interview, if you need to quickly share the slot with your students and gather their interest, Publishing Slots is the way to go!
Once you’ve received slot offers from Sites, your program may want to send a confirmation email confirming you will be using the slots in advance so that they do not forget.
Resources:
Reviewing Data Before Sending Site Emails
Publishing Slots and Managing Student Interest
Sending Slot Notifications to Students
Sending Slot Notifications to Sites
Wishlists and Placements
How much input you allow students to have in the process of assigning them to the available slots on the list varies widely from program to program. Some programs put the onus on the student alone asking them to select a number “out of a hat” and then choose a site working through the class in numerical order – this is referred to as the “lottery approach.” Others do not request input from the students at all, placing each student based on their knowledge of the students’ strengths and sites’ teaching styles alone.
Most programs allow the students to input on their preferences through a rank-ordered list, or “wish list,” of the slots in which they are interested.
Collecting Student Preferences
Within Prism, you have the following options when it comes to Wishlists:
- Students can select and rank Locations based on what they have offered via the Slot based Wishlist
- Students select and rank Locations you have available within your database via the Location based Wishlist
- Rather than ranking Locations, students can rank settings via the Setting based Wishlist
- Rather than ranking Locations or Settings, students rank geographical areas via the Location Area based Wishlist
- If your program would like students to complete a form where they request a specific Site for a placement, they can do so using the My Request Wishlist
Resources:
Making the Match between Student and Site
Using this wishlist, programs may place the students by hand considering their preferences and any additional information provided or they may choose to utilize a computer algorithm to make matches based on specific criteria.
Exxat’s algorithm, Placement Assist can randomly assign a placement, and take into consideration completed slot based wishlists. Currently, Placement Assists is readily available for PT-PTA and OT-OTA programs. All other programs who are interested in this feature must contact our support team so that we can gather your requirements and find a solution, as Placement Assist has limited functionality as of today.
Once you have decided on the best Site and Student match, you’ll place your students in the system! You’ll have two views to place students – by Site and by Student. Both views offer very similar information, the key difference is how the data is presented to you.
When managing placements, you’ll also get to decide if you manage one course at a time, or multiple course offerings at once. Bundling course offerings, known as Placement Groups, allows you to view more than just one course at a time, making it easier analyze data and make placements.
Placements by Site allows you to quickly view the Locations that have offered slots and how many offers are still available.
Placements by Student focuses on showing you the trajectory of all placements made for each student. If you use placement groups, you can ensure all rotations are included for a bird’s view of what is to come.
Once you’ve placed your students, you’ll want to inform all parties involved. Placements are not automatically shared with students. To share placement information, make sure to Publish your placements.
Resources:
Accessing the Placement List Report
Notifying Students of Placement
Once confirmation from clinical sites has been gathered, whether before releasing the list of options to students or after making preliminary matches, students should be notified of their placements.
Notifying the Site of Placement
After preliminary matches have been made between student and site, it is best practice to notify the site before informing the students
Notifying Sites of unused slots
Once all students have been placed and confirmed at clinical sites, the remaining sites that offered slots which will go un-used should be notified. This professional courtesy allows the sites to not only be aware that they will not be hosting a student from your institution but allows them to extend the slot they had reserved for you to another program if they so choose.
Resources:
Sending Placement Notifications to Students
Sending Placement Notifications to Sites
Sending Slot Notifications to Sites
Before the placement begins, students will view their placement within Prism and add any necessary additional information (should the site request it). You can review this information via our Placement Clearance report.
Learning Activities Completion and Review
Once the placement starts, students may complete the following:
- Adding Clinician Information
- Forms / Evaluations
- Patient Log
- Timesheet
- Time Off
You will have full visibility on items they are completing and will have the opportunity to review them and provide feedback to your students.
Some Forms/Evaluations may need to be completed by Faculty or Sites. You’ll want to make sure to distribute the forms in a timely manner. Faculty and Sites who are completing forms will not need a login but will receive a link to complete the activity.
Resources:
Creating Learning Activity Groups
Viewing Learning Activity Reports
Ability to edit the Timesheet entries entered by students
Continuing Education Notifications
Once the placement has ended, you can send a notification to your clinicians thanking them for working with your program and award continuing education credits or hours.
You can review clinician details you have on file prior to sending.
Resources:
Sending Continuing Education Notifications