The ProgDB is a community of university educators.  Our goal is to build tools which help educators collaborate with each other, track our successes, and inspire creativity.  As part of that goal, there are two new ways to stay connected to the ProgDB through twitter:

twitter.com/progdb

For news and updates – we will post updates about the service, preview upcoming changes, or repost ideas which might be interesting to university programmers.  Give us feedback, or share your thoughts about how you use the ProgDB.

twitter.com/progdb_all

For programming inspiration – on this account you will see recently posted programs in the community.  We want to highlight the work of university educators that are contributing to the ProgDB.  Get inspired by seeing what is going on at other campuses, or with your colleagues.

Now you can use twitter to stay updated or get inspired for your next event.

Thanks to GraphicLeftovers for the twitter egg graphic.

http://progdb.com/programs/1930-poverty-in-the-midst-of-prosperity-is-not-unfortunate-it-s-unjust

you send your friend the following link

http://progdb.com/p/E1

Who’s to say which is better – now you can choose between context or brevity. Enjoy!

We’ve been building! In addition to the revision to the tags section, we’ve included two more features that will help you stay connected with your work.

Automatic reminders once your program has completed

This is a small change, but hopefully it will make it easier to keep your programs up to date with the latest information. Now, when your program ends, we’ll send you an email reminder so that you can attach any additional files, or fill in missing information such as attendance or assessment data.

Reports

Reports were always something that we have been wanting to put into the system. We wanted to make sure we were building something that was based on how people actually used their data. We’re proud to let you know that our first version of program reports is now available on the system. If you are a group administrator, you will see a new button in the sidebar of your group page.

Before using the ProgDB, you would create reports of your programming data by manually creating spreadsheets.  After putting your staff on the ProgDB, you could automatically export these spreadsheets with instantly up-to-date programming data.  Now, you can instantly see reports of the most commonly requested data without any exporting or spreadsheets.

Conversations during the testing period and current users advised these initial reports that are available now.  Specifically, we have created interactive graphs and tables with live data showing the information that our groups were most interested in. You can see totals by academic term, by groups, people, programing form and months.  Now, instead of waiting until the end of the month or quarter to see summary programming numbers, you can see your current numbers anytime.

As always, you can still get to all of your data by exporting it to a spreadsheet, but we wanted to create visual tools that will make it a little easier to see what is going on. Since this is the first version, we expect to see a number of iterations and improvements to reports over the next few months.

Both of these features were requests from groups who are using the ProgDB. Let us know what you think and share how you use your data – it will help the ProgDB become something that you love using.  What are you waiting for – its okay to play and have fun with your numbers!

We just finished a major overhaul of the tags section. If you have an account, take a look at it now. Get lost in the work of others, and get inspired about what you can do as a university educator.

This week we introduced program graphs on individual pages. If you are looking at your own page, you will be able to track how many programs you have completed in the last few months. These graphs are only visible to you on your own profile page, and to group administrators.

We have had these graphs on group pages for a while, but we hope putting these on personal pages will help you be strategic about your goals. For example, if you wanted to make sure that you were emphasizing weekend programs, you can now see your program distribution by weekday. Likewise, it will also help you track how you are distributing your programs by month. You will be able to tell just by looking at your page whether or not you are meeting your programming goals.

Tags are the focus of a few upcoming features. Our goal is to be helpful; we hope you will continue to give us your feedback.