Experience Placement Solution: Getting Started

Updated: November 2021

Description:  The Experience Placement solution allows users to manage their experiential/clinical locations, site supervisors, and student assignment to placements, as well as the relationship between clinical supervisors/cooperating teachers and their assigned students in one solution.  This guide provides steps to prepare your AEFIS system to start using this solution.

Setting up AEFIS to use the Experience Placement Solution

• Identifying Educational Experiences
• Adding Locations
• Updating Placements
• Determine how Students are assigned to Experiences

Identifying Educational Experiences

In order to create relationships between students and preceptors through the Experience Placement solution, first either Courses or Co-curricular Activities must be identified and the Experience Placement option must be enabled in that Course/Co-curricular Activity's settings page.  If there is no specific Course that internship/experiential data should be tied to, creating a Co-curricular Activity in place of a Course is likely the right option, as one is required to move forward with next steps.

Considerations when selecting Courses or creating Co-curricular Activities for Experience Placement:

• Is the experience part of the curriculum in a specific Course in your Program?
• If outside of the coursework in the curriculum of your Program and you choose to add a new Co-curricular Activity, is there a staff or faculty member who will manage any of the evaluation processes for the preceptors or students?
• If creating Co-curricular Activities, who will manage the creation of Co-curricular sections each term?
• Are there any downstream impacts of revising and republishing that Course to enable experience placement?

Adding Locations

AEFIS has a preset group of locations in Hospitals and Schools/Educational Environments preloaded into your instance, and you may choose whether you want to import those locations or add your own manually.  We recommend reviewing the ones that are pre-loaded prior to adding your own so you can easily import from our database and avoid extra manual work. 

Location Considerations:

• At this time, only Hospital or School location types are available.
• Currently, attributes can not be added to new locations.
• To relate preceptors to students, preceptors (clinical or cooperating/supervising teachers), they must be added to Locations. 

Updating Placements

The Placement Manager allows you to create a relationship between the Course/Co-curricular activity and the type/subtype of the location.  This makes sure that students can only be matched to appropriate locations once students are populated in the Experience Manager.

In the Placement Manager, you may also determine whether students will be assigned to a placement in a Course/Co-curricular with or without completing an application form.  More on that in the next section!

How are Students Assigned to Experiences/Placements

There are two ways to assign students to their Experience Placements:

• Application Required
  The Experience Placement solution harnesses the power of the Data Collection solution to use a form/workflow process which allows students to fill out an application and receive approval for their placement request prior to becoming eligible for assignment of placements/preceptors in the Experience Manager.  If you would like to explore the application option in Experience Placements, please speak to your Customer Success Manager for more information!
• No Application Required
  This is the default configuration, and it allows the manager of your Experience Placement process to assign students to placements without completing an application.

Start Configuring the Experience Placement Solution!

Use the helpful guides below to get started:

1. Enable Experience Placement in Courses/Co-curricular Activities
2. Create User Groups of Student Cohorts
3. Import or add Locations in the Location Manager
4. Create relationships between Courses/Co-curricular Activities and Locations/Preceptors in the Placement Manager
5. Create relationships between Students and Locations/Preceptors in the Experience Manager