Your Engage community can play a key role in helping you facilitate training for your students. There are a number of strategic ways to use your community to introduce your students to training opportunities and track student training initiatives. You'll also want to consider ways to train your students on using the platform itself. In this article, we highlight tips and tricks for how to best train your users on the Engage platform and use Engage to help with training initiatives.
Make it Mandatory!
It can be difficult to motivate students to attend trainings, especially if they do not yet understand the value Engage can bring to their organization. So, make it mandatory! Incorporating an Engage-specific training into your organization registration or officer training processes is an excellent way to ensure your students are using your processes properly and knowledge is being passed on during transitions.
Utilizing Co-Curricular Paths to Track Trainings
One of our favorite ways campuses enforce mandatory trainings is by utilizing the Co-Curricular Paths tool. Paths allows campuses to track individual organization officers' attendance at various trainings and hold individuals accountable. Alternatively, some campuses will assign the path to one officer in each organization to track the organization's overall progress. Read our spotlight on Texas Lutheran University and Emerson College to learn more about using Paths to facilitate training.
Utilizing Organization Statuses for Accountability
The University of Connecticut utilizes organization statuses to hold organizations accountable for attending required trainings. In order to be considered a fully "Active" organization in the site, and therefore having access to resources and processes, organization officers must first attend various trainings. Read more about this initiative in our spotlight on UConn!
Use Alerts to point your users toward important resources
Emerson College's Engage community, EmConnect, has done a fantastic job highlighting helpful resources right from the community homepage, including a link to their EmConnect Resources organization site and links to their homegrown instructional videos.
Create an organization specific to Engage-related resources
Consider using an organization page in Engage to house Engage-related training resources. Metropolitan Community College has done this with an organization called MyHub Training Site. We love this idea of creating a separate organization site from your office or department's page that is specifically used to provide support and help documentation for various processes for your campus.
We love how the MyHub Training Site shares success stories alongside training resources. You can note some great assessment findings in the gallery above as well as news articles featuring different helpful tools supporting this practice.
Interested in the video above? You can also watch Metropolitan Community College's video describing the involvement record and experiences!
Advertise your trainings on Engage
If you're going to host student organization officer trainings, don't forget to create these trainings as events in Engage! You can encourage or require that students sign up to attend trainings by finding the event and RSVPing, and you can track training attendance using the event as well! By directing your students to Engage to sign up for trainings, you are actively supporting them as they learn to use the platform before training has even begun. The College of William and Mary hosts "TribeLink Tuesdays" - a weekly training session for students who manage organization pages in Engage and are interested in improving their skills!
