Initial Setup

This guide will walk you through the complete initial setup of DeanDesk for your institution.

1. Calendar Setup

Most institutions have academic calendars such as terms, semesters, and school years. If this does not apply to you, you can skip this step. However, this step is helpful if your courses have beginning/end dates, and you want to keep course dates consistent.

Steps

  1. Navigate to the Admin Dashboard, and select Calendar Management
  2. You will see three tabs: Academic Years, Terms, and Events

Academic Years

Start by inputting your Academic Years (the beginning and ending of your academic calendar). We recommend putting three academic years in:

  • The previous school year
  • The current school year
  • Future school year

You can change these exact dates later if needed.

Terms

Navigate to the Term tab, and input your terms, which divide the school year into smaller chunks.

Events

If your school has important events (parent-teacher conferences, holidays, half-days, etc.), you can add them to the event calendar. You can always come back and add or modify events later.

2. Create Accounts for Instructors

If your institution has multiple teachers, then each teacher will get their own account and access to their own course pages. They can create profiles, interact with students, create assignments and materials, all through DeanDesk's managed platform.

Creating Instructor Accounts

  1. Go to User Creation: Save time by creating multiple instructor accounts simultaneously. Go to the Admin Dashboard and select User Creation
  2. Enter Account Details: Follow the steps in User Creation to set up accounts. Assign usernames, first names, and last names. Use their professional school email addresses
  3. Upload a CSV: If you have many instructors, you can upload a CSV (Excel spreadsheet) with their names, emails, first names, and last names to save time
  4. Assign Roles: In Step 2, assign teachers their roles. We suggest assigning both "member" and "teacher" roles. Avoid assigning the "admin" role unless they are involved in administrative and financial decisions. You can always add more roles to individual accounts later
  5. Welcome Email: After creating their accounts, each person will receive a welcome email from DeanDesk
  6. Send Email: Review all information and click "send." We will create their accounts and instantly send everyone a welcome email with steps on how to activate their DeanDesk account

Tips

Resend Activation Emails: If accounts haven't been activated, you can resend activation emails from the top of the User Creation page. This button also shows who hasn't activated their accounts yet.

Personalize Emails: You can customize the welcome email by inserting special tags like {{firstName}} to automatically include each individual's first name.

Share Onboarding Materials: To share materials with all teachers (like onboarding guides or announcements), create a private course (e.g., "Teacher Onboarding") and assign them to it. Make sure to use a special enrollment code to password-protect the course.

3. Create Courses

Now that you have your instructors and academic calendar created, you're ready to create courses and assign them to instructors.

Navigate to Bulk Course Creator from the dashboard. Here, we use an easy Excel spreadsheet style interface to make it easy to create many courses at the same time.

Course Information Columns

Input the course information in the proper columns:

  • Name: The course name
  • Description: A short description about the course
  • Start/End Date: The beginning and ending of the course. Leave this blank if the course has no beginning/end date (evergreen courses) or if it is tied to a specific term/semester
  • Instructor: A dropdown list of all the teachers on DeanDesk. If you don't see the name of a particular instructor, make sure they have the "teacher" role assigned to them. You can check by navigating to Role Management in the Admin Dashboard
  • Term (optional): The term that the course is tied to. Selecting a term will automatically set the beginning and ending of that course
  • Tags: Keywords describing the course
  • Active: Is the course currently active?
  • Schedule: What is the weekly course schedule? Click the clock icon for the course entry to expand calendar options. You can select multiple days, times, and locations to create a custom schedule for each class

Once you have inputted all your course information, press the Validate button to make sure that there are no errors. If there are no errors, then press the Create Courses button to generate each course and assign them to their instructor.

What Each Course Will Have

Course Page: Each course gets its own course dashboard that students, teachers, and instructors can view to see a summary of the course. It displays key information related to announcements, schedule, instructor details, materials, and more.

Materials Drive: A dedicated cloud-backed drive where instructors can upload files and materials such as classroom slides, textbooks, and other materials.

Assignments: An assignments page where instructors can create assignments with due dates, descriptions, supporting materials, etc. for students enrolled in the class.

Announcements: Where teachers can give course announcements, in which every student will receive an email, notification on the DeanDesk school site, and a push notification if they are logged into the app.

Student Information Management: A dashboard for teachers to track student enrollment in the course, attendance, and record final grades at the end of the course.

4. (Optional) Setup Payments

DeanDesk offers a powerful set of payment processing tools that can potentially save schools thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours in billing, analytics, and payment processing.

Setting up the ability to take payments is quick and easy. We partner with Stripe, the world's leading payment processing platform to power DeanDesk's billing tools. Stripe provides the industry's best security, encryption, reliability, and lowest credit card and bank account processing fees.

We offer free setup support to all DeanDesk users to help get their payment system up and running. Please contact us to schedule a setup meeting!

Setup Stripe

Setting up Stripe only takes a few minutes. Simply navigate to Stripe Configuration from the Dashboard. You will see a header that displays your account status and how far along you are in the onboarding process.

Test Mode vs. Live Mode

You will see a switch that allows you to go from Test Mode and Live Mode:

  • Test Mode allows you to experiment with the Stripe platform and will not allow you to make real payments. It is a safe environment to allow you to try out how payments work
  • You can create your account in Test Mode, and then proceed to the next steps
  • Once you are ready, come back to the Stripe Configuration page, and switch to Live Mode to accept real payments. You may need to create a new Stripe account for Live Mode

Onboarding Process

In the Setup progress, you will see a list of setup steps. Click the Start Onboarding button to get started. A popup will open for the Stripe website, and prompt you to create an account for Stripe. This account will be a gateway to allow you to monitor payments from students. It will ask you to:

  • Verify your information
  • Select a bank account to which payments from DeanDesk's platform will be deposited

Once you get approved (usually takes only a few minutes), you are ready to accept payments. Sometimes, you may be asked to provide additional information like a TIN or SSN document to verify your data and comply with regulatory requirements.

How to Create Recurring Payment Plans

After you set up your account, you have two ways of accepting payments. You can use both. Payment plans are useful for subscription-based programs that have a monthly fee.

  1. Navigate to Tuition Plans from Admin Dashboard
  2. First, create a Program, which represents a group of various payment plans, such as "Part Time Program", etc.
  3. After creating a tuition plan, create a Pricing Plan, which are specific pricing plans where you can specify the amount and billing cycle

Examples:

  • Monthly plan for $100 which will automatically charge participants $100 monthly
  • $600 6-month plan, which will automatically charge participants $600 every 6 months from the day that they enroll in that plan

Once you have successfully created a Pricing Plan, when students navigate to their recurring payment section in their profile, they will be able to select and enroll in a plan.

How to Send Invoices

Invoices are useful for schools with complex billing and fees, where it is necessary to invoice students or families for various fees that may differ depending on many factors.

  1. Go to Invoice Management in the Admin Dashboard
  2. Select the students to bill
  3. You can input line items in the invoice
  4. You can also issue refunds - simply put a negative sign "-" before the line item amount. This will refund their outstanding balance by that amount

Students will receive a notification about the new invoice, and can see their total outstanding balance that they owe when they go to their Billing History. They can pay their total outstanding balance from there, and also view their billing and payment history in the same place.

Getting Paid

Once you start receiving payments, they first get accepted and processed by Stripe. You can see those payments from your Stripe dashboard, which you can access from the top right of the Stripe Configuration page. Here, you will have access to powerful analytics tools powered by Stripe.

Stripe periodically deposits payments into your bank account once they are processed. It may take some time for the payment to be deposited as Stripe holds the money while the payment is being processed and verified.

You can change bank details, account details, and more through the Stripe dashboard as well.

5. Create Accounts for Students

Now that you have created a calendar and courses, you can create accounts for your students and get them onboarded.

Creating Student Accounts

  1. Go to User Creation: Save time by creating multiple student accounts simultaneously. Go to the Admin Dashboard and select User Creation
  2. Enter Account Details: Follow the steps in User Creation to set up accounts. Assign usernames, first names, and last names. Use their professional school email address if they have one
  3. Upload a CSV: If you have many students to add at the same time, you can upload a CSV (Excel spreadsheet) with their names, emails, first names, and last names to save time
  4. Assign Roles: In Step 2, assign students their roles. We suggest assigning both "student" and "member" roles. Avoid assigning the "admin" or "teacher" role
  5. (Optional) Assign Courses: A powerful feature of DeanDesk is that you can automatically assign students to their courses as soon as you make their accounts. This saves a lot of time and effort when creating schedules for students. If you already created your courses, at this point, you can assign students to their courses. You can also individually assign courses to students through the Bulk Enrollment tab in the Admin Dashboard
  6. Welcome Email: After creating their accounts, each person will receive a welcome email from DeanDesk
  7. Send Email: Review all information and click "send." We will create their accounts and instantly send everyone a welcome email with steps on how to activate their DeanDesk account

Tips

Resend Activation Emails: If accounts haven't been activated, you can resend activation emails from the top of the User Creation page. This button also shows who hasn't activated their accounts yet.

Personalize Emails: You can customize the welcome email by inserting special tags like {{firstName}} to automatically include each individual's first name.

Share Onboarding Materials: To share materials with all students (like student handbooks, guides, etc.), create a course (e.g., "Student Onboarding") and assign every new student to it.

Next Steps

With your initial setup complete, you're ready to explore: