Re: Save the trees (and forms)

[epiedmontmarton@mail.utexas.edu (Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton)]

Becky, Katie, et al,

I'll see if I can explain this satisfactorily.

When a student comes in they sit down next to the person at the front desk
and answer a few quick questions.  If they hve visited the UWC before,
this process goes very quickly because you can just enter the ss# and the
remainder of the student's file will pop up on the screen.

We then collect some info specific to that particular visit:  assignment,
instructor, what issues/problems the student wants to work on.  The desk
person then types in the name of the consulatnt (for reasons you will
understand in a moment), and off they go.

After the consultation, the consultant sits down at one of three computers
set up for this function and types his or her name at the prompt.  This
calls up all consultations he or she has done that week, with the most
recent first.  Then all the consultant has to do is enter the times the
consult began and ended, check boxes about the nature of the consult
(grammar, esl, rhetorical, organization, development, brainstoriming, etc),
and enter a brief descriptive record.

If the student does want a note sent to the instructor, the consultant
clicks a button to that effect and the record of the consultation becomes
the text of the note.  The name of the instructor will appear as it was
recorded in the original check-in  with the student as will the name of the
consultant.

Now as to HOW all this magic works...We use FileMaker Pro that has been
customized first by Sara and then by Xavier.  Xavier spent quite a long
time writing the scripts and subscripts to make this do what it does.  I'm
sorry to report that I can't tell you how to do this.  We create a back-up
on another harddrive in addition to the zip drive.  Although it feels risky
to be to take off the paper training wheels, I worry a lot less than I used
to.  We figure any act of man or god that would destroy all electronic
records almost certainly would have taken out the piles of paper as well.

You can't imagine the amount of time this saves.  The consultant used to
hand write the note on the printed registration form and then it all had to
be typed in.  We used to also spend absurd amounts of time filing and
unfiling student folders (hmm...unfiling?).  There are a few drawbacks.
The consultant does not have a file in front of her with the student's name
and history at the UWC, and some consultants have found this unsettling.
The overwhelming consensus, however, is that the benefits far outweight the
drawbacks.  (I also tend to think that the students found the presence of
those files unsettling more often than not.)

Anyway, sorry to go on so long.  Hope I have helped.

Elisabeth

Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton,Ph.D.
Coordinator
Undergraduate Writing Center
FAC 211
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712
(512) 471-6222
epiedmontmarton@mail.utexas.edu