How OT Programs Are Meeting the 2023 ACOTE Standards for Fieldwork Documentation 

Somewhere between the spreadsheet, the shared drive, the emailed PDF, and the faxed evaluation, the data exists. The challenge is getting to it when it matters. 

That friction is exactly what the 2023 ACOTE standards for Section C: Fieldwork Education put under a spotlight. Documentation, competency tracking, and program evaluation now carry specific, verifiable expectations and programs are being asked to demonstrate them, not just describe them.  

When we hosted Dr. Traci Kruse, Director of Experiential Learning and Assistant Professor of Occupational Therapy at the University of Minnesota, for a recent webinar on solving the fragmentation problem in OT fieldwork management, she described what that pressure looked like in practice and how her program implemented a system that could meet it. 

Watch the on-demand webinar here. 

Dr. Kruse had been managing fieldwork for a cohort of approximately 50 students for nearly eight years. She knew exactly what meant to run a program without a centralized system, and what became possible once that changed.  

Here is what she shared. 

What the 2023 ACOTE Standards Require 

Section C of the 2023 ACOTE Standards, effective July 31, 2025, establishes specific requirements for how OT programs document and manage fieldwork education. The standards are detailed, and they are designed to be verifiable. 

Among the most operationally significant requirements: 

C.1.2 requires that students have access to site information, requirements, objectives, and performance expectations prior to the start of fieldwork. 

C.1.3 requires documented agreement between academic and fieldwork educators on objectives prior to the start of each experience. 

C.1.6 requires that at least one fieldwork experience has a primary focus on mental health, behavioral health, or psychosocial aspects of client performance.  

C.1.11 and C.1.12 govern Level I fieldwork provision and formal evaluation, and Level II scheduling, length requirements, and time documentation 

C.1.13 through C.1.15 address supervisor qualifications, supervision progression, and student performance evaluation at Level II.  

D.1.5 requires programs to document that students meet the 14-week minimum length requirement for the doctoral capstone experience. 

For programs that have historically managed this information across multiple disconnected systems, those requirements raise a practical question: where does all of that documentation actually live, and can you produce it when it matters? 

That was exactly the question Dr. Kruse's program was previously facing. 

What Fieldwork Coordination Looked Like at the University of Minnesota Before CORE 

Before implementing CORE by PeopleGrove, the University of Minnesota's OT program was managing fieldwork across a familiar mix of tools. Dr. Kruse described it directly. 

"Prior to using a learning management system [CORE], we were tracking our placements in spreadsheets. We had our site agreements in a university-developed database. We had our sites sending evaluations in by fax or email. I even had one site that sent me a student evaluation — they printed it and gave a paper copy to the students." 

When accreditation preparation arrived, the impact of that fragmentation became impossible to ignore. Ensuring complete files for every student across five to seven years — two sites per student, for 50 students, per cycle — meant weeks of administrative work compiling, cross-referencing, and reformatting data that existed in multiple places and formats. Manual placement coordination meant back-and-forth emails with sites, spreadsheet tracking, and significant room for human error. 

"You do the math," Dr. Kruse said. "That was a nightmare." 

What made it harder was that fieldwork coordination was never the only thing on her plate. As Dr. Kruse put it, placements were not her only role, and they were not the only thing happening at the same time. Students were often already out on placements while she was trying to coordinate the next cycle, often while teaching as well. The fragmentation had real costs. 

How CORE by PeopleGrove Supports ACOTE Section C Requirements 

CORE by PeopleGrove was built to centralize the documentation and coordination workflows that Section C now requires programs to demonstrate. At the University of Minnesota, Dr. Kruse walked through how their program uses CORE to meet specific standards directly. 

For C.1.2, CORE gives students a dedicated space to access site information, previous student evaluations of their sites, and site expectations before they submit placement preferences. The documentation of that access lives in the platform, so programs can demonstrate the process was followed. 

For C.1.3, CORE is used to send fieldwork educator preparation surveys that confirm site objectives and document educator agreement prior to each experience. At UMN, this is also how they verify that educators are qualified to supervise at the appropriate level, which supports compliance with C.1.13 as well. 

For C.1.6, CORE's site tracking allows programs to see across a student's placement history and confirm that at least one experience addresses mental health, behavioral health, or psychosocial aspects of client performance — a requirement that is difficult to monitor reliably without a centralized record. 

For C.1.11, and C.1.12, all Level I, Level II, and capstone sites are scheduled and tracked within CORE, ensuring students receive the required variety of placements, meet hour and length requirements, and have their time documented accurately. 

"CORE is imperative to tracking our Level I, Level II, and capstone sites," Dr. Kruse said.  

"We schedule all of our Level I, Level II, and capstone sites in CORE. So it helps us to track where students are so we don't send them to the same site for all three experiences." 

For C.1.14 and C.1.15, CORE is the platform where programs deploy and manage fieldwork evaluations — including the AOTA Fieldwork Performance Evaluation and the Student Evaluation of Fieldwork Experience — with automated routing, deadline reminders, and reporting built in. Evaluations are routed, completed, and stored within the platform, and programs can pull data at the individual student level, the cohort level, and the programmatic level. For D.1.5, capstone timesheets and hours are tracked in CORE as well, giving programs the documentation mechanism the standard requires. 

Dr. Kruse described the reporting capability as one of the most meaningful differences for her program's accreditation work. 

What Changed After Implementation

When Dr. Kruse talked about what changed after implementing CORE by PeopleGrove, she kept coming back to two things: time and visibility. 

Placement coordination was the most immediate change. Using CORE's SmartMatch tool, students complete a preferencing survey and the platform matches them to sites based on their ranked preferences. Dr. Kruse described what that meant in practice: 

"Placements used to take me generally three to four weeks from start to finish and double-checking before I could really send them out to the students and say, here's your preliminary placements.  

Now they do their preference list. I do the SmartMatch. I go in and double-check that the SmartMatch matches our fieldwork model that we have for our program. And it takes me maybe a week or two depending on how long I let them have their preference list open. It's super quick. It's super easy, and there's a lot less error on my end." 

The reporting capabilities changed how the program approached annual accreditation reporting and self-study preparation. 

 "The reporting features in CORE are hands down phenomenal," Dr. Kruse said. 

 "We can pull reports from individual student level all the way to cohort level to programmatic level." 

For the faculty supervising Level I placements, the difference was equally clear. As one onsite Level I faculty member put it: "Our Level I evaluations are so much easier in CORE!" 

Across CORE by PeopleGrove's partner network of more than 500 institutions, programs report saving up to 10 hours per week in administrative time. That is time that goes back to students and to program quality. 

What This Means for Your Program 

The 2023 ACOTE standards did not create new challenges for OT programs. They formalized ones that already existed. Most programs have always needed a reliable way to track placements, document supervisor qualifications, manage evaluation timelines, and pull cohort-level data for program improvement. The standards simply made the expectation explicit. 

If your program is still managing that work across spreadsheets, shared drives, and email threads, the transition that UMN made is worth understanding in detail. Not because the old way was wrong, but because there is a better one that is designed for exactly this. 

Dr. Kruse's program began their onboarding process with dedicated implementation support from the CORE team at every stage. Today, they’re three years in and the difference in what her team can see, demonstrate, and report on is significant. 

If you are preparing for a program review, approaching a self-study cycle, or simply trying to get ahead of what the 2023 standards require of your documentation infrastructure, I would welcome the conversation! 

Request a Demo →