Pathways Base Camp Manager for the Vice President Education

Taking opportunities to recognize the contributions of individual team members shows that you are paying attention to their work and appreciate their efforts

- John Montgomery

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

So, you’ve been elected the Vice President Education for your club. Congratulations! Have you got your head around all the things you are now responsible for? I certainly hope so. There’s one area that often gets glossed over when you look at the list of responsibilities and that is approving your club members’ Pathways levels. To do that, there are two steps you must do: first, approve their Pathways level in the Pathways Base Camp Manager, and second, approve the level completion in the Club Central - Submit Education Awards. This blog is about Pathways Base Camp Manager.

Pathways Base Camp Manager has so much more functionality than approving the Pathways levels. Here are the three sections on the Base Camp Manager:

“Pending Requests” is where you approve any outstanding level completion requests. This is the section that VPEs use most often.

“Member Progress” is quite useful for tracking your members’ progress and “Manager Tutorials” will give you detailed online tutorials about how to use it.

I’m not going to go into all the details that can be found under “Manager Tutorials”. You can spend a couple of hours going through all those videos at your leisure. I will, though, list the videos here for you.

1) Base Camp Manager Overview

2) Project Information and Resources

a) Project Information and Resources Overview

b) Viewing Another Club Member’s Profile

c) Tracking Your Meeting Roles

d) Searching and Browsing on Base Camp

3) Level Completion

a) Level Completion Overview

b) Responding to Level Completion Requests (Paths on Base Camp)

c) Printing Certificates (Paths on Base Camp)

4) Path Completion in Printed Materials

a) Level Completion in Printed Materials Overview

b) Validating Project and Level Completion Requests (Paths in Print)

c) Printing Certificates (Paths in Print)

5) Projects Outside of Our Club

a) Projects Outside of Out Club Overview

b) Responding to Initial External Training Requests

c) Responding to External Training Completion Requests

6) Tracking Progress

a) Tracking Progress Overview

b) Individual Progress Dashboard

c) Path Progress Dashboard

d) Path Type Dashboard

e) Recent Registrations Dashboard

f) External Training Dashboard

As you can see from these titles, there are plenty of features in Base Camp Manager that are very useful to the Vice President Education for tracking members’ progress. In this blog, I want to focus on two of them: Level Completion and Tracking Progress.

Level Completion - Pending Requests

When a member marks a level complete in their Pathways Base Camp, you will receive notification of that completion. You are the only one to receive that notification. However, if you are unable to log into the Base Camp Manager, you can ask your President or Secretary to approve the level on your behalf. They won’t get the notification, though. They can find it using the Pending Requests tab.

Go to the Pending Requests tab. You will see a list of all Pathways completion requests that need to be actioned. As the VPE, you are responsible for verifying that the member has completed all the requirements for that level. If yours is the only club that they belong to, it is straightforward since you will have their speeches in your club’s history. If they belong to multiple clubs or they have given speeches outside of Toastmasters and wish to get credit for them, then you may have to use the Tracking Progress tab to confirm their level completion. If you cannot confirm it, you may need to reject the level completion request. I recommend contacting the member first to find out what you might have missed before you reject it, though.

Note: for members who are using the printed material, there are different procedures. We don’t have any members using the printed materials so I have no tips. I suggest reviewing the Manager Tutorials to find out how to do that.

We do, however, have members using the Accessible Material. As Vice President Education, you cannot approve their levels. There is a form to complete and email to Toastmasters International. Ask the member to send you the form, which includes all the directions you need.

One last point on approving levels, if a member has requested approval for a speech outside the club, there are procedures to follow which are outlined in the Manager Tutorial.

Now that you have approved their level in Base Camp Manager, the next step is to log in to Club Central and submit their education award there. I should note here that you can approve Pathways levels in any order (for example, you can approve level 2 before level 1), but you cannot submit them in Club Central out of order. Members must complete levels in order in Club Central.

Also, in terms of Distinguished Club Program (DCP) points, one member can be counted for multiple levels but not for multiple times in one level. One instance per level per member per Toastmasters year. In other words, Jane Doe can achieve levels 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 in one Toastmasters year in multiple paths, and the club will get credit toward DCP points for all of those but Jane’s achievement of, let’s say, two level 3s in each of two paths cannot be counted twice.

Member Progress

This is a very useful part of Base Camp Manager. This is where you can track members' progress. There are six different reports here.

For each report, when you first open the report, the graph may be empty. Click on the down arrow in the upper right-hand corner of the graph and click on Refresh. It takes some time, depending on which report it is. You’ll see a bar graph showing the number of entries in that report.

To see the details, click on that same down arrow and select ‘view details’. There will be a popup window with the details in a tabular format below the graph. From there, you can print it or save it as an image by clicking on the three bars in the upper right-hand corner of that window. Note: you can also export the information to Excel from the drop-down arrow.

1. Individual Progress – shows you the current status of your members’ progress through Pathways. There are 5 graphs, one for each Pathways level, showing the number of projects for that member in that level. When you look at the details, you can see the specific projects for each member, the path name, and whether the project status is ‘in progress’ or ‘completed’.
   


2. Level Completions – This report shows which levels have recently been completed on base camp within 90 days. The second graph shows the same thing but for levels completed in print. Because this only shows the last 90 days, I find it not very useful.


3. Path Progress – Here you can find out the paths registered but not yet started, the paths in progress, and the paths completed. There is also a graph showing all three.


4. Path Type – This report shows the path delivery methods used, specifically online or print


5. Recent Selected Paths – This report will show you the paths which have been selected in the past month.


6. External Training – This last report shows which members have completed external training.

Note: these last two reports are empty as of today’s date (end of June 2022. Also, the Path Type report is incorrect. It is showing only online members even though the Level Completion report shows a level completion in print. This may be because that level completion was done via email.

I hope this helps you to find those hidden gems, especially in the reporting features. Base Camp Manager can help you in your role as the Vice President Education in tracking your members’ progress. Good luck in your journey.

Karen MacNeil, DTM