From operations to accreditation, WCU’s Social Work Program streamlined data management at every stage with Exxat.

Introduction

Social Work Programs have their unique set of needs and challenges when it comes to field education management. Built on the strength of relationship between the university and agencies, the majority of tasks – including placements, field instructor assignments and coordination with agencies – require a personalized, hands-on approach. Despite this, there is a large scope for offloading many aspects of field education management to a cloud-based solution while still maintaining a people-driven strategy, leading to a more efficient system in place.

The Social Work Program at the Western Carolina University was one of the early movers to leverage Exxat’s solutions – STEPS and CCS – for field education management and handling learning contracts. Catherine Allen, Assistant Professor and Director of Field Education, outlines how Exxat helped the Social Work program at WCU optimize data collection and management.

“Having Exxat has been extremely helpful in letting us do a better job of tracking and collecting data.”

-Catherine Allen, MSW
Assistant Professor and Director of Field Education,
College of Health and Human Sciences
Social Work

Accessibility and Time Savings

Every Social Work program needs to maintain accessible records. Prior to Exxat, WCU’s Social Work program maintained all agency relationship data on paper. This proved to be a challenge, especially when looking up longitudinal information, such as if a particular student was placed in an agency or not. With Exxat, Allen could get these details easily.

A cloud-based data collection system also empowered Allen’s team to manage administrative work with ease. Simple tasks like finding student records could take up to 10 hours every semester, while scanning student documents could take as much as 20 hours. Exxat eliminated these labor-intensive tasks and brought in more efficiency in data maintenance.

Even field instructors appreciated the ease of supervision, now that they no longer had to rely on a mountain of paperwork to complete evaluations, maintain supervision progress notes, timesheets, learning contracts, roles contracts and so on.

Figure 1: Comprehensive Student Records

Enhanced Online Timesheets and Learning Contracts

Shifting to an automated system for students to fill out their timesheets, in the words of Allen, was a “no-brainer”. It was a move that was always in the pipeline. Getting this crucial data on paper and scanning it every time was clearly inefficient and an administrative burden.

What was surprising and highly beneficial upon switching to Exxat was the enriched data collection that helped the program in other areas. Allen illustrates this with the example of grant reporting. WCU’s Social Work program has an integrated health grant in place, and getting student information is an important prerequisite for the grant. One of the fields the grant needed was the amount of time students spent learning telehealth. Allen reached out to the Exxat team who added the category of “Telehealth” in the timesheets, and the students are now tracking this metric as well.

As for learning contracts, students could complete them online within Exxat. With all their learning tasks tied to competencies, students could self-evaluate at midterms and finals, with Allen being able to see in real time how well her students are meeting CSWE standards. Additionally, supervisors were automatically emailed a link to the student’s learning contract at midterms and finals to evaluate the student. This paperless and automatic process allowed Allen to track all her students in one place in real time, so she could be more on top of knowing how all her students are doing out in the field.

Figure 2: Learning Contract and Evaluation Form

Field Instructor Credibility

Unlike other programs, field instructors in Social Work have a broad scope of degrees and accreditations that qualify them to work with students. For instance, there are field instructors with an LPC (Licensed Professional Counselors) who may not have a degree in Social Work (LLC SW) but are still permitted by the university to supervise students.

In order to track the accreditation of such instructors, the program has to maintain supplementary information in the form of resumes or work experience documents.

In Exxat, Allen found both the comprehensiveness to collect all relevant information pertaining to the field instructor’s credibility and the flexibility to include data that falls outside the predefined parameters. This allowed the program to make more informed decisions for student placement, while still being able to validate them with the necessary supporting documents.

Additionally, Allen used Exxat to send out Field Instructor and Task Supervisor “Intake Forms” to collect information. These forms are automatically sent out through email with a unique link that the supervisors click to input all of their information. This information is directly synced and updated within the Exxat database, saving the team time and manual effort.

Figure 3: Clinical Field Instructor Qualification Form

Data collection during COVID

The onset of COVID instantly brought into focus the shortcomings of a manual data collection and communication system employed by many Social Work programs across the country. During COVID, only some of the students in the Social Work program were deemed “essential” and allowed to proceed with their fieldwork. Without a paperless system, many of these programs and students were caught in a bind.

Exxat enabled WCU to collect all information from agencies and students alike via online channels, thereby allowing program continuance.

Key Takeaways:

Upon partnering with Exxat, some of the benefits that Allen and her team experienced include:

• Efficient and paperless data collection that simplified managing student placements, learning contracts, and reporting

• Savings of 30+ hours per semester for administrative tasks

• Ease of communication, especially during COVID

To know more about how Exxat can enhance various aspects of your Social Work program, visit:

https://exxat.com/programs/social-work/

Conclusion

While Social Work programs rely upon interpersonal connections, they are more robust with an efficient data management system in place. The Social Work program at WCU achieved this by communicating their needs to the Exxat team and working closely with them to implement solutions. This enabled them to not only make their day-to-day processes easier, but also showed long-term benefits in terms of reporting, accreditation, and communication protocols during COVID.

Educating Smarter with Exxat

Exxat is an education technology start-up that provides cloud-based products to Health Science Educational institutes for managing students' clinical and didactic education in the United States. Founded in 2011, we support over 1000 health science programs across universities and colleges, including renowned institutions like Yale University, Columbia, John Hopkins School of Nursing, Duke University, University of Washington to name a few.

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