Self-Reported Experiences provide administrators a way to collect information from students on activities they do outside of the classroom that aren't already being tracked in Engage. These experiences can include anything from honors and awards received, to employment or internships held, to off-campus memberships and event participation.

Each Experience Type that a system administrator creates represents a form that students will be able to fill out and submit in order to have an experience of that type added to their co-curricular record. Community administrators can create experience types by accessing the Admin view of the Switchboard, clicking on Users, and then clicking Experience Types.

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Select the blue +Create Experience Type button at the top of the page to create a new type. Enter a name for your Experience Type. Examples include Awards, Conferences, Cultural Experiences, Internships, and Study Abroad. Keep in mind that this name is what students will see when they want to add an experience to their co-curricular record, so aim to make these titles accessible to your users. Then, enter a description for your Experience Type. This description will be shown to other administrators and to users who are filling out a request for this type, so be as detailed as you find necessary!

 

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Select whether you wish submissions for experiences of this type to be "Reviewed by an Administrator" for approval or "Automatically marked as accepted". If you opt to have an Administrator review experience submissions, each submission must be individually approved before the experience will become an official part of the submitter's co-curricular record. If you opt to have submissions automatically marked as accepted, then each submission will immediately become an official part of the submitter's co-curricular record without approval.

 

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Next, decide whether you want to allow users to select Path Items completed with experiences of this type. In other words, you are making this type of experience available for Co-Curricular Path completion. Note this option is only relevant if your campus has Paths enabled. You will also need to decide whether you want to make experiences of this type available for students to include on their transcript. Though the primary purpose of the Experiences feature-set is to allow students to add non-organizational records to their transcript, you may wish to collect experience submissions for activities that are not meant to be shown on the record.

 

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Finally, you must decide to include or hide each of the available fields on the Experience submission form students will see for this Type. If you decide to include a field, you must additionally decide if it should be "Required" (i.e., the student will not be allowed to submit the experience without providing a value for the field) or "Optional" (i.e., the student will be allowed to submit the experience without providing a value for the field). For each field you may also provide a set of custom instructions. These instructions will appear when the student is entering information into the field. This allows you to give very specific guidance on the type of information you want students to provide when filling out the form for each specific experience type. Click Create to make your new experience type available to students! If you ever need to remove an experience type that you no longer want users to access, return to the full list of experience types and click on the name of the type. At the top of the type's details, click Deactivate.

 

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Check out our article that provides some example Experience Type configurations that you may want to use in your Engage community.

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