Set up a Department – Prograds Help and Support

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In Prograds, the highest level of organization is the Department. Departments can have multiple programs.

1. Contact Prograds

The first step to set up your department is to add one person as the lead administrator (the Account Owner). So please email us at info@prograds.com and we'll make that happen.

2. Activate your Administrator account

You'll get an invite email from us and you'll just need to set your password to get into Prograds.

Check out our Onboarding Plan and Sample Text for a plan for the first couple of weeks.

3. Set up the Department

You first set up your department.

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You'll Set up Programs after you've got the department basics into the Prograds system. You can Create & Invite Users (Students and Faculty) after you've set up Programs.

In the top header bar, the Admin Tools button will take you to the department and programs setup area.

Department Settings is in the left menu.

Each of the tabs in Department Settings enable you to set and edit the features of your department. Go through them in order, from left to right. For each one, input the settings that are appropriate for your department.

Basic Info

Department name: The official name of the department, like Chemistry or Political Science. (Omit the "Department of")

University: Please use the full official name of the institution.

Department Abbreviation: The code for the department used in internal systems like course registration and HR. (e.g. CHEM or PSYC)

University_Department code: Use the standard abbreviation for the university, then an underscore, then the same abbreviation used above. (e.g. UBC_CHEM or UTK_HIST)

Account Owner is preset and can only be changed by Prograds support.

We also display the Faculty invite link here so you can copy it to send to faculty to set up their accounts. You can also get this link from Add Faculty on the People Dashboard page.

Settings

The following is a list of settings that the department can choose to use or ignore, depending on its needs.

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Consider having some of these on in the first month or two of Prograds use, so students can input information themselves. Then you can check what they entered. From there, you may want to turn off some of the settings that allow students to change supervisor and committee, add funding items, or change stage transitions.

Department has labs: When this is on, labs are enabled and will display on faculty profiles and student profiles and progress pages. When it is set to off the Labs setting tab is greyed out.

Academic Year start month: Enter the number of the month of the start of the academic year. This is important so we can display university-specific year-in-program information and total funding by academic year in each student’s funding timeline.

Users must consent to privacy / security agreement: If you switch this on you will see a text entry box to hold your department’s notification to users. We will show this when they first log in and record their agreement. If they do not agree, they will not be able to access Prograds and will have to discuss it with the program administrators.

Students can add their own courses: This governs whether students can add courses to the department’s course list. This can be a big time-saver. In most cases Prograds is not the system of record for students coursework; it is only used so faculty and program staff can quickly see what courses a student took.

Students & Faculty can set students’ supervisor and committee members: When this is on, students can select their supervisor and committee members on their profile page. When it’s off, only department admins can assign faculty to supervision and committee membership.

Students can set and edit their own Stage Transitions and Transition Dates: When this is on, students can move themselves from stage to stage and set those dates. This can be useful if you are onboarding a lot of students who are already well into the degree.

Students can add their own Funding and Employment items: These settings give the students the ability to enter Funding and Employment items. If they are off, only admins can enter these items on a student’s progress page.

Email Notifications for Student Milestones & Requirements: When this is on, supervisors get emails notifying them when a student completes a milestone. This also governs whether faculty get a notification that they have been added to a committee or as a supervisor.

Supervisors get monthly student reminder emails: When this is on, the supervisor gets the monthly email that goes to the student with their upcoming and overdue milestones and requirement ideal and deadline dates. We recommend setting this on to keep supervisors on top of their students’ progress.

Number of days before deadlines that notifications will be sent: You can change this at any time to change the lead time for notifications in your department. All students receive a monthly email that indicates when milestones and requirements are:

Overdue

Approaching the due date (within the number of days specified by this setting)

Past the ideal date but not yet approaching the due date

Approaching the ideal date (within the number of days specified by this setting)

Note: Notifications will not be sent for Milestones and Requirements until after 30 days from the time they are created. This allows departments to create student accounts, populate the milestones and requirements, and ask students to complete the ones already completed. There is a 30 day period before those milestones and requirements are included in the monthly emails.

List of Home Departments or Campuses for Students and Faculty: This is for Schools, Institutes, or Interdisciplinary Programs that have multiple home departments or campuses. You set them here so that you can then set the home department or campus on the Faculty and Student Profile pages. Then you can filter for students or faculty from one department or campus on the People Dashboard page.

More? We'd like to hear from you what settings would be useful at the department level.

Administrators

On this tab you add co-administrators. If they don’t have a prograds account then use their name and official university email. Prograds will send them an invite to create an account. Once that's done, they will have the same privileges as you. The only difference is that they can't remove the initial Account Owner's administrative role. (If that's necessary, contact support@prograds.com).

More details are available on how to Add and Remove Administrators.

Email Notifications. There is a toggle setting for each administrator that says whether they receive email notifications when automatic notifications go out to students for upcoming or overdue milestones and requirements.

Note that all adminstrators have full admin privileges to see all students and faculty. If you need campus- or program-specific administrators, please let us know. That feature is not yet built, but we have it on our roadmap.

Programs

You can set up a Program (see separate support page) by clicking the plus icon on the Department Settings tab on the Admin Tools page. Click the Create Program button and enter its name (e.g. MA, PhD, MPP, MBA) and then details. After a Program is created, the Edit Program button on this tab will take you to the Program Settings tab. Here on the Department’s Programs list, you can also copy the invite links to send to students.

Funding Sources

Funding sources are set at the Department level, not the Program level. Your list of funding sources is used only to fill in details when a Funding item is created for a student. However students’ Funding items can also be entered manually, without having its details populated one of these funding sources.

Funding sources include awards, stipends, scholarships, employment (TA, RA, etc.), and research funding. (e.g. NIH, NSERC, SSHRC, NSF, University Fellowships, etc.).

To create a funding source, click the Add New button on the Admin Tools page. This will call up a pop-up where you can specify Funding name, source type (optional), value (optional), maximum months (optional), and whether it is research or teaching. When users create a new Funding item for a student they can edit these options. If at a later date you update a Funding Source name or value it will not change existing funding items that used that Funding Source.

Courses

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Because the Instructor field for each course is drawn from the list of Faculty in the Department, it is best to wait to populate courses until all Faculty have created their accounts in Prograds. (See Create & Invite Users (Students and Faculty)). If you have faculty who should be listed as Course instructors but cannot have accounts (i.e. have left the department), contact us at support@prograds.com with a list of names of those and we will add those names to the Faculty list without creating accounts.

Courses are defined at the Department level and then attached to students' records. There is nothing student-specific about a course.

Courses have a Code, Instructor (from Dept Faculty listing), Year, and Title.

Courses can be entered manually or uploaded as a csv file.

Courses in Prograds are not meant to be a system of record with grades. They are meant only for informational purposes to show what courses a student has taken and (optionally) is taking.

The Department Settings allow for Departments to choose to allow students to enter course number/title (see above).

Labs

If the Department is set to have labs (see Settings above), you simply add Labs with a Director (PI) and the name of the lab. At this time, funding and labs are not connected in Prograds, but you can set a Funding Source type (see above) to be a lab or labs in general.

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Check out our Onboarding Plan and Sample Text for a sequence of steps and text you can use to communicate with faculty and students.

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That's it. You're set up. You can edit these settings anytime from the gear icon at the right of the header bar. Now you can move on to set up your Programs.