Hi All,

My team has had to develop some pretty intensive data recording systems over the last few years, both because of huge, rapid growth in demand, but also because we’ve had to prove to management the necessity of hiring more staff.  We now have an Access database that  records a large amount of information, but we are far from perfecting our systems.  Ideally we’d like to do card swiping – and would love to hear from those who use it – but budget code freezes are preventing that sort of thing at the moment.

We offer drop-ins, appointments, centralised workshops, special events, and workshops/lectures in the academic schools.  For all but the last on this list we record each individual student who attends, including student number, gender, status (home/int’l, full time/part time), whether they speak English as a first language, level, and academic school.  For in-school workshops we record details about the workshop and just the total number of students in attendance.

We initially take this data by having students fill out a record form, which is then input manually into our database by our team and our administrator.  This meant, though, that we had a backlog of paper to be entered until about halfway through term 2.  Once a student record is entered, though, any further visits they make are quick to put in.  Also on the plus side, we now have an excellent database that shows us unique student visits, plus total visits, and it allows us to pull out reports on virtually anything you could ask for (our quantitative analysis/SPSS adviser is a legend and set the whole thing up).

Finally, for our writing and learning appointments, we recently started using LibCal, by Springshare.  Our Library uses LibAnswers, another product of theirs, and we’ve found them to be a great and responsive company.  LibCal is fab, and we’ve set it up so that students put in all the information above at the point of booking.  This eliminates a lot of paper usage, and saves a lot of time.  For next year, we’re working on how we can set up LibCal so that we can export all the data into an Excel file and pop it straight into our database.

Sorry for the novel, but as you may have guessed I’m quite fascinated by this kind of thing.  Happy to answer any questions if anyone wants to get in touch directly.

Best wishes,

Courtney

Dr. Courtney Hopf

Acting Academic Skills Manager

ASK Academic Skills

The Library

Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH

01895 266106

Good morning all,

Feeling inspired/confident in view of the recent prompt for discussion, the team at Aston have a few questions about monitoring the number of students who visit Learning Development Centres (or equivalents) in your institution(s):

i)                    How do you monitor the number of students who visit your centres? (for example, do any of you use a form of card swiping system?)  

ii)                   What are the pros and cons of the systems which you do use?

iii)                 Do you record the number of students who use the various services which you offer?   For example, we have a maths drop in centre and wonder what the most efficient (and least intrusive) way of capturing data on students and their needs is.

iv)                 Many of you will also offer workshops, room bookings and one-one appointments and we are keen to learn about the practical day to day booking systems which you use and similar to the above, whether or not these systems help you capture data.

Any advice, musings and experiences would be welcome.

Thank you in advance,

Debbie De

Learning Advisor

Learning Development Centre

Aston University

Birmingham

B4 7ET