“Do you know who I am?” Why attendance monitoring is never going to work in higher education

(I hate titles - they're either really long and boring or really, really click-bait-y (this manages both): the rest of this page is the caveat). I recently had a lengthy conversation with an excellent colleague about student engagement and attendance. She had been working with students about the problems with attendance and ways to improve …

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Modelling how to ‘make students attend’

I'd argue that practically no students have perfect attendance. In the focus groups I wrote about in the last post, the students felt that they had good attendance, but it wasn't perfect. They didn't attend for a variety of reasons: because the sessions weren't perceived as interesting enough, they'd prioritising coursework, were ill etc. These …

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Student Engagement Literature Review (2010)

<blogging as a filing cabinet> A bit like the hippy search for nirvana (you'll know it when you see it), the term 'student engagement' can be a little vague. I think this is because at times it becomes synonymous with 'student learning' or 'student experience'. I've described a broad definition of student engagement in the …

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Gravity assist: report of the digital teaching and learning review (February 2021)

In summer 2020, in response to the first national COVID-19 lockdown, we used learning analytics data to manage a calling campaign to students who appeared to have been most disadvantaged by the transition to wholly online learning. In essence, we pulled together a team of volunteers to contact students who appeared to have disengaged from …

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Moving Student Inductions Online: NTU Welcome Workshop case study

New student induction is a process. Students start their courses with some understanding of what it's going to be like, with a mountain of expectations and plenty of anxieties. Historically, universities often rush the transition process and seek to squeeze it into an administratively convenient week of guest lectures, important messages and introductory events. Of …

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Teaching in a COVID world: how the sector moved online

I'm sick of COVID. I'm sick of the isolation. I'm sick that virtual isn't the same as in real life. I know we've probably only got months to go now, but I'm sick of it all the same. It seems that at the moment there is a lot of discourse is about how hard it …

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