(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 Retention
“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 …
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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 …
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 …
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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 …
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. …
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Onwards from Learning Analytics (OfLA)
At the time of writing, we are entering the final year of our latest Erasmus+ collaborative project. Onwards from Learning Analytics (OfLA) is a learning analytics project interested in supporting students at risk of leaving university early or failing to achieve their potential. We don't take the view that students ought to be retained no …
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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