Accelerus is a powerful database program that allows schools to assess and report on students' progress, in accordance with the school's needs. Some aspects of Accelerus that make it so powerful and flexible include:
| • | Each school defines when and how they assess and report on students. For example, schools define their academic cycles which may differ for different sections of the school, eg for junior years compared to the final years of secondary schooling. |
| • | Schools define their own cohort types, eg their year levels, home groups, etc. |
| • | The report preparation features of Accelerus allow great flexibility, linking in with Microsoft Word, so that schools may design and create their own report formats, with different report runs using different formats, eg term report formats compared to semester reports. Even within the same report run, it easily accommodates different requirements, eg Year 12 reports compared to other years in a secondary school. |
| • | Accelerus can be adapted for use by all schools, whether it is a small primary school, a large secondary school, one that covers both primary and secondary levels, or a specialist school. |
| • | A school defines the level of access that any teacher or other school personnel may have. |
Access may be at the school, subject, class or cohort level so that, for example, individual class teachers have access to their classes while a year coordinator or subject coordinator may be given privileges to the year levels or subjects they coordinate. Others may be given access to all data across the school, but may only modify very specific aspects of it, or have read only privileges. The Accelerus administrators have complete access.
| • | Accelerus may be configured to run in different ways to suit the school's needs. Teachers may work on assessing their students in any of the following ways, or a combination thereof: |
| ➢ | In an offline file that contains just their classes and which can be worked on at school or at home. |
| ➢ | Directly in the Accelerus database, using the same Accelerus program, when attached to the school network. |
| ➢ | Via the web, using any browser such as Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. |
| • | Data may be imported into Accelerus in order to populate the database when setting up at the beginning of a new cycle and as required. |
| • | A range of tools are available to perform various bulk processes, such as the enrolment of students and the rolling over of academic cycles, eg from one year to another, or one semester to the next. |
| • | Accelerus understands the needs of teachers and includes many features to make their assessment tasks as efficient and easy as possible: |
| ➢ | Comment banks may be set up and these may be drawn upon when writing comments. |
| ➢ | Two views - results grid and single student view - can be toggled between, depending on the teacher's preference or the type of assessments being worked on. |
| ➢ | Teachers may display a photograph of the student being currently assessed. |
| ➢ | Multiple teachers may be assigned to a class and all can be working on their own assessments in the same class simultaneously. |
| ➢ | The large variety of tools to assist in the assessment process includes spelling and punctuation checking, printing listings of comment and/or non-comment results, fill up and down, selective viewing and sorting of assessment data, etc. |
| • | Data that is in the Accelerus database may be analysed so that, for example, student progress may be tracked, award recipients may be determined, and so forth. |
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Schools in the Victorian Government and Catholic sectors have all of the tools available to them in Accelerus to set up and produce reports, based on the Victorian Essential Learning Standards (AusVELS), as required by the Victorian Department of Education and the Catholic Education Office.
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