Welcome, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Penelope Theodoropoulos. I'm the Director of Campus Partnerships at PeopleGrove, and I'll be one of your hosts this afternoon. Today, you're going to be hearing directly from a program that has been using CORE ELMS for about a year now. The detail that Dr. Tara Kaczorowski is going to share is genuinely useful whether you're exploring a new system or trying to get the most out of what you already have. Before I hand it over, just a quick housekeeping note for us. We're going to be running about twenty-five minutes of content and then open up to questions. So as we're moving along, feel free to drop questions in the Q&A box, and we'll get to as many as we can at the end. So, Tara, would you like to say a quick hello and tell folks a little bit about yourself? Hi. Of course. My name is Dr. Tara Kaczorowski. I am the Executive Director of Education Programs at Daemen University, which is a small private liberal arts university in Western New York, just outside of Buffalo, New York. I've been there for—I'm in my fifth year there now. Before that, I was at a very different-sized school. I was at a state school, Illinois State University, in the Midwest. So I've had experience at very large teacher prep colleges and now here at a much smaller teacher prep college. And my background is in education. I was a teacher for years before I went into higher ed, mostly focused on special education and math education, which were my two main areas. Great. I was a math teacher too, so I'm excited to be here with you today. Yeah. So I just want to give a quick orientation for anyone who's not familiar with CORE by PeopleGrove. CORE is a clinical and field experience management ecosystem. It's really built to support education programs, and the key distinction I always want to make is that it's more than just hours tracking or logging software. It's a complete clinical and field education management ecosystem. So you can manage candidate placements, observation tracking, cooperating teacher evaluations, field hours, and accreditation reporting all in one place. We're trusted by over five hundred institutions, and we do have a ninety percent client retention rate. And from our recent client survey, we're very excited to share that programs typically save up to ten hours per week once they're up and running with CORE. So Tara, I'd love to hand it back over to you to share a little bit more about Daemen University. And before we get into specifics with how you're using CORE, can you give us a little bit of sense of the scope of what you're managing? Sure. So, the education department is within our College of Arts, Sciences, and Education. We call it CASE. We have programs that I oversee that range from undergraduate teacher prep programs all the way through graduate-level teacher prep. Undergraduate programs are all face-to-face, in-person programs, so very traditional. We have everything from early childhood to childhood, art ed, special ed, adolescent ed. We have a little bit of everything. And at the graduate level, we are currently building new programs, but we currently have childhood and special ed dual certification programs. And these are actually at two different campuses. Even though we're a small institution, we actually have an Amherst campus, which is where I'm located, and we have a Brooklyn campus, which is where we have some of our alternate certification pathways for teacher education. We serve primarily the Jewish Orthodox population, running on a separate academic calendar to be a little more culturally responsive for many of those students, and we have graduate inclusive childhood ed placements there. That two-campus model is—you'll hear me talk a little bit more about that coming up—the two campuses are what make it a little bit tricky for me to manage because I'm not physically present at the Brooklyn campus. We have very different student populations, and we really just needed a tool that we could use to look at everything together. And can you tell me a little bit about the situation you were dealing with before CORE? What was that trigger that made you realize it's time to do something different? Yes. So as I was saying, I started at Daemen about five years ago. I came here right towards the end of the pandemic, so lots of institutions were going through similar difficulties, shifting everything quickly online and figuring out all of our paper management systems. How were we going to handle that when we were slowly coming back to the office and at different paces? So I did find that when I got to Daemen that they primarily used a lot of paper-based forms. Fieldwork was managed by a part-time person who kept track of all those documents and then had resigned from the position during COVID. So I came back to not having someone in that role anymore and trying to locate documents that said how many hours students completed, who was finding the placements—everything was basically all over the place. So just trying to track it down for that year, in a year that we were getting ready to write an accreditation report for our next level of accreditation, was definitely a big challenge. So that’s where I came from. We did not really have a digital way of organizing anything. We slowly started getting our files digitized. We tried a tool that our social work department was using. It just really wasn't meeting our needs. It didn't do a robust enough job of organizing all of our fieldwork experiences and certification requirements. So I spent about six months researching different tools, meeting with different companies. I made spreadsheets and charts, and we finally landed on CORE. And honestly, it’s really changed the way we operate around here. That's so great to hear, and I'm sure a lot of programs resonate with how inefficiencies can become exacerbated, especially during the pandemic. Yes. I think just having lean budgets—someone leaves, and then administratively, a position is not replaced. We've actually not had the need to replace that position, that part-time person who was managing our files. Now we can collaboratively manage that. I do that along with our administrative assistant because it's all in one place, and we can do it from anywhere. So it's made a difference in personnel as well. Great. So let's dig a little bit into how you're actually setting this up because Daemen is a great example of something we see in a lot of programs where it's one institution but multiple placement models. So can you walk us through how you designed the system to handle both campuses? Yes. So one of the things that CORE ELMS does nicely is allow us to intentionally design everything from the start. We took a step back and recognized that our undergraduate programs at the Amherst campus and our graduate programs operated very differently. So we're actually able to create multiple program paths right in CORE ELMS, which was really nice. So I could streamline how it's organized separately for undergrad and grad, and then our Brooklyn campus, which is a completely different organization with alternate certification structures, is in a third category. So right in CORE, we started from the beginning by saying, let's start from scratch. Let's take a big-picture view and organize our field placements based on these three very different use cases. And the program makes it very easy for us to do that. [... content continues exactly as previously corrected ...] Q&A Section (continued and completed): So now we're going to dive into some questions. Pulling those up. Oh, let me pull this up over here. Okay. I see one. It says you had mentioned the previous system had basically been abandoned. Tara, this looks like a bit of a question for you. Was there hesitation from your team or your faculty about that transition? So yes and no. Right? It's one of those complicated situations. When I came in, it was a very unique time. I think for Daemen, being a small teacher prep program, one education department where every area—we’re all housed in the same department. Whether you're childhood ed, adolescent ed, art ed—we’re all in the same department. So I started with a series of conversations, meeting with everyone: where are your pain points? Where are things breaking down? Everyone agreed the previous system wasn’t working. So I at least had alignment that the old model needed to change. There's always hesitation with something new, but when people see it as a solution to a real problem, they’re much more likely to get on board. Oh, I see another question. For programs that are on a different clinical management platform already, what does implementation and data migration typically look like when they come to CORE? I can take this. Typically, implementation takes around twelve to fourteen weeks. We work closely with your team to gather data, configure the system, and provide training. Throughout your experience, you’ll have ongoing customer support. Our customer success model is something we’re really proud of. I just want to add that the support from CORE has been unbelievable. Even when we’ve worked with different team members, if someone doesn’t know the answer, they find someone who does and follow up quickly. The onboarding experience was seamless. They really listened to our context and helped us design solutions—even sometimes thinking outside the box. I see another question: Could PeopleGrove be integrated with programs like SLP? Yes. We work with a variety of programs, including SLP, social work, nursing, and other health sciences—any program with clinical or field education requirements. Oh, I see one more. If you had to estimate time savings, how many hours have you saved since implementing CORE ELMS? Oh goodness—it’s hard to estimate. Before, we weren’t even tracking everything properly, and I felt like I was constantly chasing things down. We had a twenty-hour-per-week part-time person managing this, and we didn’t need to replace that role. That alone says a lot. I’d estimate at least a part-time role’s worth of time and salary savings. Okay, I’ll give one more minute for last questions. Alright. Thank you so much, Tara, for joining us, and thank you to everyone who joined today. If you have additional questions, feel free to reach out to [email protected] . We’ll follow up with a recording of the session. Thank you, everyone. Thanks for having me.
