(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 …
Category: Student Engagement
“Never tell me the odds”: why scaring students into engaging probably won’t work (without a bit of a tweak)
I am currently looking at our own institution’s approach to attendance/ engagement monitoring and then the associated follow up actions. One of the approaches I hear from frustrated colleagues and senior managers is that we just need to tell students about the association between attendance and success. Whether done by scaring them with the risk …
Student Attendance: explaining the post-Covid Crisis
Possibly the biggest question in the sector right now is “Where the heck are the students?”. Attendance in classes appears to be down across the HE sector leading to some understandably frustrated tweets (here & here) and students aren’t necessarily replacing face-to-face learning with online activity. Attendance always falls over the course of the academic …
Continue reading Student Attendance: explaining the post-Covid Crisis
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 …
Student attendance/ engagement policies – why do we bother?
The 2021/22 academic year was a bit of a surprise for the sector. Students were effectively released from the pressures of lockdown and social distancing and ended up more anxious, more confused and certainly less engaged than at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. It may be that students were just catching up on two …
Continue reading Student attendance/ engagement policies – why do we bother?
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 …
Continue reading Student Engagement Literature Review (2010)
A Typology of Student Engagement Activity
Students drop out from their courses for a variety of reasons. Early withdrawal is shaped by Socio-economic forces, students' personal goals/ mission for being at university, the lived experience of studying and sometimes just bad luck. We may not be able to precisely weight these factors, but they appear pretty consistently in studies. The sector …
Millennials in the virtual church aisles – a thought for universities
A few years ago I was asked the question by the colleague "Is blockchain the future of higher education?" After quite a lot of reading and head scratching I reckoned the answer was "no". However, the question keeps coming back. I still think the answer's "no", only these days it's "***k no". The more I …
Continue reading Millennials in the virtual church aisles – a thought for universities
Contacting Gen Z Students – part II
In the last piece I explained how in our most recent Student Transition Survey (Feb-Mar 2021), we asked students how they would like to be contacted if our learning analytics platform had raised an alert. When presented with a single choice, 32% wanted to be contacted initially by text. We will build this in to …
Minimising Risk vs Maximising Success: learning analytics intervention strategies
At the other end of the phone is a student. Your learning analytics tool has predicted that they may be at risk of early departure. Under the circumstances they are likely to benefit from a supportive, sympathetic conversation, or perhaps they need a nudge or a jolt to make them realise they need to re-engage. …
Continue reading Minimising Risk vs Maximising Success: learning analytics intervention strategies
Living Learning Analytics Blog 