Office of Experiential Education selects centralized tracking platform

The Office of Experiential Education (ExEd) is excited to announce Symplicity as the selected vendor of its new ExEd centralized tracking platform.

Symplicity has been a Purdue partner for years through the use of MyCCO, the career services manager (CSM) component of the Symplicity brand. Symplicity CSM is also used by the College of Engineering. In addition to CSM, the Office of ExEd platform will use Symplicity’s UniHub. UniHub offers students a unified experience to explore available experiential education opportunities, report on their experiences, complete reflections, and create a record of their experiential education journey while at Purdue.

ExEd program leaders will be able to use the new system to promote opportunities to students, import participation rosters, communicate with students and create reports detailing data about experiential education offered within their programs or units. Additionally, UniHub has the functionality to receive data and program information from other university platforms such as Banner, Brightspace and established department-level tracking platforms.

Tracking of ExEd data is an important goal of the Office of Experiential Education. Through feedback from ExEd stakeholders, program leaders, faculty and staff, the desired features of a centralized tracking platform were determined. Having a central record of ExEd participation will allow Purdue ExEd program leaders and stakeholders to use data to better understand where programs are reaching students with ExEd opportunities and where gaps exist. This platform will allow ExEd leaders to make data-informed decisions about program development and assist with telling the story of ExEd at Purdue more effectively.

Participation in implementation needed

Platform implementation will take place in stages over the course of the next 6-18 months. The Office of ExEd would like to extend an invitation to ExEd program leaders (both faculty and staff) to participate in the pilot phase of implementation. The pilot is set to begin this spring and complete by August 2023. A group of early adopters will be identified to assist the Office of ExEd in developing each of the different methods of engaging with the tracking system. These methods include using one of the Symplicity tools directly or providing data from a program’s own tracking system.

Those involved in the pilot would attend implementation meetings and trainings over the course of the spring semester and would work to set up their program information in the new system during May and June, with testing to occur in July and a soft launch in early August.

To express interest in having your program included in the pilot phase, complete the ExEd Platform Pilot Interest Form. Deadline to apply for participation in the pilot is Jan. 23.

For more information, contact Jennifer Dobbs-Oates, the director of the Office of Experiential Education, at jendo@purdue.edu.

About the Office of Experiential Education

The Office of Experiential Education was created to carry out the experiential education component of the Transformative Education 2.0 initiative. The office is part of the Office of the Provost, in the Teaching and Learning Division. The mission of the office is to support, enhance and expand undergraduate experiential education at Purdue – West Lafayette.