Onboarding Plan and Sample Text – Prograds Help and Support

Here's a suggested sequence for onboarding your users. Sample email text is below.

Onboarding Sequence

Week 1

Prograds creates department site with one owner and any additional administrators.

Admins set up Department (instructions) and Programs (instructions):

Choose Department settings.

Decide whether students can add funding items, select their supervisor and committe, and add courses

Set up Stages, Milestones, Requirements, Funding Sources.

DO NOT set up any Courses because they need a faculty instructor from existing accounts.

Administrators get trained, either self-directed from Support Site or a session with Prograds support.

Admins agree on and record protocols for use: e.g. whether messages will be sent to students from Prograds, settings and recommendations for email reminders (auto or manual, from whom?), etc.

Admins can add any additional administrators as required.

Week 2

Administrators invite Faculty (sample text below).

Wait 3 days, send a reminder, then wait another 3 days. Ensure all faculty members have accounts. If any faculty are unresponsive, contact support@prograds.com with their names and email addresses and we will create a placeholder account for those faculty members.

Provide faculty info/training session (create a couple of fake students for this).

Week 3

Administrators invite Students (sample text below)

If the Department allows Students to add course information, mention this and note that when one student adds a course it is then visible for all students to add it to their own course list.

🗣

We strongly recommend you forcefully point student to First Steps for new Student Prograds Users.

Wait 3 days, send a reminder, then wait another 3 days and see which students haven’t signed up. Send them a less polite email. 😉

Week 4

If you haven’t allowed students to select their own committee from their profile page, the admin team will have to do this, student, by student. In fact, if you have an up to date list of supervisions and memberships for faculty members, it’s easier to do this from each faculty member’s Prograds Profile page.

Administrator(s) do a complete review of all faculty and students to ensure correct information and correct deployment and timing of Stages, Milestones, Requirements, Funding, etc.

Monthly as long as necessary

Students automatically get a monthly email reminder with the status of their milestones and requirements.

Note that Students and Faculty get an automatic reminder email if they haven’t logged in in the past 45 days.

Review the adoption and communications plan as a graduate program team. Use the Prograds Usage table from the tables icon in the header to see who has logged in and used Prograds.

Sample text for Faculty invitation

Dear __________ Faculty,

After consulting broadly in the department, we have made the decision to adopt a new online system for tracking, and more importantly, facilitating, graduate student progress. It’s not just for administrative use; it’s a system where faculty and students enter most of the information, so everyone is on the same page to help our students progress. Students and faculty can indicate that milestones and requirements are completed, update what is being worked on, see the student’s funding status, and enter notes and all kinds of relevant events like meetings and conference attendance. It was designed by a faculty member primarily as a way for grad students to see their timeline clearly, take more agency as they go through the program, and communicate with their faculty advisors.

The system is called Prograds. It's crucial that you start to think of Prograds as your go-to place to stay on top of how your students are progressing. You get a Dashboard listing all your students and you can click into each one to see a detailed progress record with the following areas: Working On, Events, Milestones, Requirements, Funding, Employment, and Courses.

We’d like to reassure you that this isn’t a clunky administrative system that adds more work for all of us. Instead, it consolidates in one place all of the scattered information that currently sits in spreadsheets in the program office, in the university registration system, in the funding and finance systems, in email threads, and in student and faculty notes. It might help to think of it as like an electronic medical record, with all the student’s information and history, plus a record of all the academic equivalents of consultations and tests and prescriptions. And it comes with regular email reminders for students about upcoming ideal completion dates (and then deadline dates) for milestones and requirements. We believe that using Prograds will shorten time-to-degree by keeping students on track and preventing all those stressful deadline extensions, which cost us all time and money.

We access Prograds at https://app.prograds.com. Here’s the link to create your faculty member account: [[[[PASTE LINK HERE FROM ADD FACULTY BUTTON ON PEOPLE DASHBOARD PAGE]]]]

Note that it comes as a password reset link.

After you’ve created your account and logged in, please go to the person icon in the header to complete some items on your profile, including a headshot picture. Please do so as soon as possible, as the system really only works when all faculty and students have accounts.

An introduction to Prograds and guides for all its functions are available here. (support.prograds.com). Here’s the guide to the most important page, the Student Progress Page: https://support.prograds.com/student-progress-page

We’re bringing faculty into the system first, followed by students next week. It works better in that sequence. So you won’t see any students on your dashboard until they create accounts later on. When students complete their profiles, they’ll add their supervisors and committee members. If you then see a student you don’t recognize, let us know and we’ll clear that up.

If you have any questions about the system, we’ll be holding an info and training session on….

We hope you and your students save time and they make better progress with the use of Prograds. If you have questions, send them to [admin or DGS ?]. If you notice anything that you don’t understand or doesn’t seem to be working, please send feedback to Prograds from the top left of the Prograds header bar, or send a description of the problem to support@prograds.com. Your message will be answered directly by Prof. Fred Cutler, a Political Scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Sample text for Student Invitation

Dear __________ graduate students,

The department has a new online system for tracking graduate students’ progress and helping students and faculty stay ‘on the same page’. It’s not just for administrative use; it’s a system where faculty and students enter information, too. You and your advisors complete milestones and requirements, update what is being worked on, and enter notes and events.

It’s called Prograds. By adopting it we hope students can see their pathway through the program more clearly and enter information that makes it easy for your advisors to stay on top of your progress. You and your advisors will be able to see progress and funding on-demand, in real time. You’ll see the your program milestones and requirements with ‘ideal dates’ and ‘deadline dates’ relative to your program entry date. Students can enter events like meetings, publications, conferences, and so on. And you use the “Working On” area to enter signposts for research tasks and progress into and through the dissertation phase.

We access Prograds at https://app.prograds.com. You will receive a separate email with a link from which to create your graduate student account.

An introduction to Prograds and guides for all its functions are available here.

After you’ve created your account and logged in, please go to the person icon in the header to complete some items on your profile. Please do so as soon as possible, as the system really only works when all faculty and students have accounts. Faculty should already be in the system, so when you complete your profile, the first thing to do is to add your supervisors and committee members. If a faculty member isn’t there, please let me know.

On your Student Page (different than your Profile Page), you’ll see the department’s standard Stages, Milestones, and Requirements. If you're more than a year into the program you will have some that are marked as overdue, but that's obviously because they haven't yet been acknowledged as complete in the Prograds system. You can go ahead and indicate ‘Complete’ for the ones you’ve done, providing a date of completion. We’ll approve those completions over the next few weeks.

If you have any questions about the system, we’ll be holding an info and training session on….

We hope you and your professors save time and you make better progress with the use of Prograds. If you have questions, send them to me. If you notice bugs in the system, please file a Prograds bug report from the header bar, or send them a description of the problem to support@prograds.com.