Feature Spotlight
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Staff Training Made Simple: How to Use CourseStorm to Empower Your Instructors
Instructors are the lifeblood of your education program. These are the people who have the most direct connection with the learners who take your classes. Many of CourseStorm’s customers have told us that some of their instructors have cult-like followings of students who will take any class they teach. So training your instructors and teaching artists on the tools you use to run your organization makes sense. Here are some benefits of showing your teaching staff how to use CourseStorm.
Simple Access to Class Data
Most teaching artists are creatives, not techies. That’s not to say they can’t use technology, but most artistic types would rather practice their art or dream up new projects for their students than figure out a complicated software platform.
“Not only is CourseStorm easy for me to use, but it’s also really easy for me to train a teaching artist to use.” – A theatre customer
Another thing we hear frequently from our customers is that learning CourseStorm’s class registration software takes so little time compared to others.
Elana Kepner, education director at Marin Shakespeare Company said, “I’ve worked for other arts organizations, so I can speak from the perspective of various kinds of registration. I really appreciate that not only is CourseStorm easy for me to use, but it’s also really easy for me to teach a teaching artist to use without taking a huge chunk out of our training time so that they can access information as they need it.”
In fact, CourseStorm training for instructors basically consists of setting them up with a staff login and giving them access to their class data. That’s it. Once instructors are logged in, they can:
- View the class(es) they are scheduled to teach
- View class rosters of enrolled students
- Print or export rosters into Excel
- View individual student info
- Email students
- View class waiting list, if any
- View cancelled registrations, if any
Here’s a short video that shows what your instructors see when they login to CourseStorm:
CourseStorm | FYI: What Your Instructors See
Don’t worry about instructors “messing up” anything in the system or on your course website. They can only access the information above. They can’t add, edit, or delete any data. They also can’t perform any financial transactions.
Empower Instructors By Training Them on How to Use CourseStorm
One of the key benefits of CourseStorm is that it saves programs time. Nonprofits are notorious for having to do more with less, and our class registration software eases the administrative burden for office staff, volunteers, instructors, and teaching artists. Registrations are completed online, rather than over the phone or by email.
Data integrates seamlessly with your donor management system, rather than requiring time-consuming and tedious data entry.
CourseStorm’s benefits extend to teaching artists as well. When they can access their class rosters and student data directly, it cuts out the middleman and empowers instructors to manage their class themselves. They can email their class to send them a supply list or remind them of an upcoming schedule change, for example.
Two of CourseStorm’s newest features are designed to make things even easier for instructors: mobile instructor admin and attendance tracking.
CourseStorm is always adding new features, and two of our newest ones are designed to make things even easier for instructors. Our new mobile instructor admin area gives teaching artists the ability to access everything they need on the go, since we know not many of them are sitting behind a desk all day. This new version will replace our existing instructor admin area for all customers with access to that feature and is available in our Pro plan for new customers.
Our new attendance tracking feature lets instructors take attendance and view attendance history right from their phones or tablets.
Many community education instructors and teaching artists teach classes for several different organizations. If those programs use CourseStorm, it’s even easier since instructors can use the same login to access all of their classes that are offered through CourseStorm.
What CourseStorm Training Is Available?
If you’re curious about what CourseStorm can do but want to see for yourself, we encourage you to sign up for a free trial. This allows you to create a demo site on your own, with helpful guidance that walks you through the steps of how to build and use a CourseStorm site for your class registrations.
If you do decide to become a customer, we offer weekly live onboarding or on-demand videos, depending on your plan, that show you how to use CourseStorm right away. “Our software is very intuitive. It’s easy for someone to set up a site in an evening or a weekend,” said Hayli, CourseStorm’s customer onboarding lead.
If you are a teaching artist or work with them, read and share these other helpful articles: Educating Arts Educators: 6 Ideas for Professional Development and 5 Ways Art Teachers Can Balance Teaching and Creating Art. Be sure to subscribe to our blog below so you don’t miss a thing!
Abigail Green
Abby has overseen content development for higher education degree programs related to education, technology, business, and healthcare. One of her first jobs after college was working with children’s programs for the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is an experienced and versatile writer and editor whose work has been published by Johns Hopkins, the University of Baltimore Alumni Magazine, and The Chicago Tribune.