Form Submissions tracking enhancements
The tracking and output of School Form submissions is lacking some key elements, making it less productive than just paper forms in some ways.
In Submissions dialog, when you click on "x of y" in Submissions column of School Forms page (onCampus for example) -
- Need filter by School Division, like Lower School, Middle School, Upper School. Checkboxes for selecting multiple, like both LS and MS which is often done together. Very, very crucial for schools with separate roles handling different divisions. Excruciating to separate otherwise.
- Need way to facilitate calling Parents who only Started or Not Started. With single forms, but more for a bunch of them at beginning of school, we always resort to phone calls to get parents to pay attention. Many ignore emails so Notifications not helpful at some point. So, provide relevant phone numbers in export, or upon hover of parent name, or? (Recipient may be Student too, so dorm #, cell #?)
- Need Export and Print of Started and Not started as well (Both with Submitted, or one their own.) That is, a way to create a worklist of whom to call to bother to get forms in. Can kind of copy/paste from dialog into a spreadsheet, but cannot depend on that. A hover as described above may work, but keeping dialog open long time not idea.
- Need status of who signed, who didn't. Too indirect to try and do that now (have to impersonate...). Should be in this dialog, plus in Core/PeopleFinder/[person]/FilesForms: where if it says Continue, should indicated "X and Y signed, pending Z's signature." And recipients should see in their Files&Forms screen. Many problems getting multiple people to sign.
- Need way to look at a Family, and see Form status of all members (all enrolled children, parent recipients.) Can kind of do it by sampling one parent, because there is usually symmetry (all parents have same set of forms), but not guaranteed.
- Need way to look at Student, and see all Form status where they are User Regarding. Current view of Core/PeopleFinder/[student]/FilesForms is blank. Viewable by Coaches or Athletic Directors too, via Team Roster. This may be bug currently being looked at...
Idea K12OR-I-16 related to this, by talking about printed output of core fields, and some forms.
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Vincent Jurgens
- Aug 24 2015
Related ideas
This idea is CRUCIAL. This is greatly impeding workflow at our school for many parties (nurse, athletics, administration, etc.).
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This is absolutely crucial in terms of workflow:
Need Export and Print of Started and Not started as well (Both with Submitted, or one their own.) That is, a way to create a worklist of whom to call to bother to get forms in. Can kind of copy/paste from dialog into a spreadsheet, but cannot depend on that. A hover as described above may work, but keeping dialog open long time not idea.
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Joe Adu, we were plagued by signature form tracking for many years. The bane of my existence at the beginning of the year was collecting signature pages, tracking who did and didn't turn it in, and running down those who didn't. Weeks of misery. We eliminated that hassle completely this year and it's made a huge difference in the start of the school year! Here's what we did.
We took the signature page out of the handbook completely and created a Handbook Acknowledgement school form. We publish the handbook digitally (it is available on the Resources page for faculty, students, and parents, as well as on our public website) and make the Handbook Acknowledgement form mandatory by the first day of school, with student school exclusion if it is not signed. We usually give parents a week or two to get caught up (the automatic reminder feature on the forms is extremely helpful in this) before pulling students out of class. It's amazing how quickly forms are completed when their kid calls and says "I'm in the office and I can't go back to class until you fill out this mandatory form that was due by the first day of school two weeks ago." ;) The online form makes it super easy to track, and also makes it super easy for the parent to correct the issue immediately wherever they are (assuming they have an internet connection and device handy).
The onus is then on the parents to either read the handbook and sign, or NOT read the handbook and sign. The only acceptable reason to not sign is if they disagree with a policy, but if that is the case, they must make an appointment to talk to the principal about it and action is deferred until after the meeting. After the meeting they either sign it (most policy disagreements are simply a misunderstanding of the policy) and all is well, or they still don't agree with it, and chances are they are not a fit for our school, it becomes a different issue, and it moves on from there.
In essence, if their child is enrolled in our school, they and their student are bound by the handbook policies, period. Our form now states that this is a one-time signature for the duration of your child's enrollment so our current families will not have to worry about it ever again. Starting with the new admissions season, it is going to be part of our admissions contract so it won't ever be in our hands again. (What a beautiful thing!) This allows us to update the handbook when needed, not restricting us to only update annually since the dated form only covers the handbook in the state it was in when they signed. The Acknowledgement form states changes may be made, and if they are major policy changes we will send a notification email (if we make minor changes, correct a typo, or clarify language, etc. we do not send an email out) and it's the parent's responsibility to read those notifications.
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We need this!!
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This is a good list, Vincent. To add, it would be useful if there was a way to also tie a form's status (e.g. whether or not it has been signed/acknowledged) to a user's access to the website. We distribute handbooks via the website and it is a pain to get parents to acknowledge and do so in a timely fashion. We explored whether we can link that to their login access, but currently, there doesn't seem to be a way to accomplish that. It would be something like - if handbook acknowledged is no, then restrict access to grades/report cards/etc... something like that to further incentivize parents.
Would be interested in knowing how other schools get parents to acknowledge/sign the handbook in a timely manner.
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As in many areas in BB, displayed user names should include 'nickname' as many students have, for example, an 'asian' name and an 'english' name. Without the nickname, it is very difficult to know which student it is without opening another tab and doing a search.
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This is a great evaluation of the School Forms, Vincent.
I hate to say it, but I can't see a lot of evidence of good usability testing for the School Forms module. WhippleHill usually excels at that. School Forms shows promise but was not ready for prime time when released.
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This could be a separate issue, but when there are "Users regarding" with no recipients, you have no way to know who it is. Infuriating!
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