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. In this article, we highlight a few campuses using Paths for this purpose and showcase how they have these Paths configured.
Emerson College
Emerson has set up a simple yet effective path using all event attendance items. The path requires student leaders to attend a series of four workshops that prepare them for their roles in campus organizations: Policy and Procedure, SGA Financial Policy, Organizational Management (a training specifically for their Engage platform), and Individual Leadership Development.
Administrators created four Path Items, all of which are completed via attendance tracking within the site. Each item represents a different workshop students are required to attend, and the completion criteria includes each instance of the event being hosted within Engage.
Administrators can easily keep track of how a student is progressing through training by navigating to the Paths tab of their User information in the Admin view of the community.
If you host organization trainings or workshops and use attendance tracking features to keep track of which leaders attend these sessions, a path similar to Emerson's might be a great fit for your process!
Texas Lutheran University
Texas Lutheran University (TLU) takes a slightly different approach to their officer training path, utilizing self-reported experience items to create the process. Each organization's primary officers are required to complete this path, which provides links to training videos and then has students submit self-reported experiences to answer questions about the trainings they viewed.
Each path item represents one training that users are asked to watch and complete. Note in the photo below how the path item is configured - administrators provide a link to the training, and select the option that the item can only be completed using the self-reported experiences tool.
Then, an Experience Type is created for each training, as shown below. Each Type represents a separate form that students are required to fill out in order to complete that path item.
When students go to self-report their experience, they are then prompted to answer specific questions that pertain to that individual training. This holds students accountable to watching the training and paying attention to the information being shared. Each experience type is configured to be reviewed by an administrator before being approved, so campus admins can ensure these forms are being filled out properly as students progress through the path. Note that for each experience, students identify which organization they are representing and answer training-specific questions.
If your student organization officer training happens primarily via videos or other means not in-person, we definitely recommend the self-reported experiences strategy that TLU utilizes! You can also consider a hybrid path, where some items are completed via event attendance and others are completed via self-reported experiences.
We encourage you to touch base with your consultant about any ideas you have to implement organization officer training using Co-Curricular Paths!