Field Directors

Hello All,

We are broaching the topic of incorporating student fees or program fees to support educational initiatives in our department.  For example, we're interested in onboarding a database to help organize and store practicum related information, yet we have no funds to support this.  I'm wondering if any of your programs take this approach, and if so, if you'd be able to share your process.  Any information would be incredibly helpful.

Thank you,

Jessica

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Jessica Ulrich
Practicum Education Coordinator
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Edwardsville IL
(618)650-5758
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Hi Jessica, we are undertaking this right now (in fact I go before the Student Fees Committee today). We have historically used IPT as our practicum tracking system; however, we have found in the past few years we have simply outgrown this database and need more in terms of data collection. We are proposing a switch to Tevera. When we used IPT, the department paid for this; however, Tevera is more costly and thus we are asking for a student course fee to be added to our BSW and MSW students to offset this cost. Unfortunately our department cannot pay for this and it would be a cost passed on to students (one time course fee in BSW and one time course fee in MSW). We have asked for this course fee to be added as we do not have ANY course fees across our entire program, for practicum education we do not utilize textbooks, and many of our students are able to utilize employment-based (or paid) internships. We are sensitive to the costs of higher education and do not wish to pile unnecessary fees onto our students; however, we truly believe we need a better tracking system. Feel free to email if I can be of any help. 

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Dana Holcomb, DSW, LMSW-Clinical
Associate Professor and Director of Field
Ferris State University
Big Rapids, MI 49307
231-591-2763
danaholcomb@ferris.edu
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