Today’s students have now experienced three years of disruption in their educational experience and Personal Academic Tutors continue to face new and heightened challenges with student engagement as a result of lockdown and remote learning.
At the height of the pandemic, disconnection threatened the sense of belonging and wellbeing. According to the Office for National Statistics, during the lockdown, 63% of students reported a worsening in their wellbeing and mental health, and 26% reporting they experienced loneliness. This academic year the effect is being realised with students showing lower academic confidence and lower engagement with on-campus learning and teaching.
Recent research by Pearson and Wonkhe found that 39% of students surveyed agreed that “I doubt my abilities and feel like I do not deserve to be at my university” (sometimes known as ‘imposter syndrome’).
How is this affecting student engagement and what can universities do to support their students going forward?
Despite the many advantages of online learning, we are witnessing a significant shift in how students engage which is potentially more problematic for Personal Academic Tutors to manage than we could have imagined.
The change in student engagement has largely been student-led. Students are choosing how, when and with what they engage. This makes it more difficult for tutors to know if students are engaging, how they are getting on and who may need support.
In addition to increased student numbers and the adoption of a growing technology ecosystem, Personal Academic Tutors are also required to find new ways to keep connected, better understand students’ pastoral needs and provide more personalised and specialist support.
Building relationships is fundamental to building a sense of belonging, cohort identity, and academic confidence. This requires being proactive, providing guidance, reassurance, and positive reinforcement. How can tutors do this at scale, especially when they don’t know when and where their next student interaction will be?
This understandably raises a number many of questions for academic tutors…
To help students to succeed in this challenging environment they need to better understand the value of engagement and the correlation with success. And, tutors need access to a deeper understanding of engagement to inform their interactions.
The definition of engagement that Solutionpath aligns with is that of participation in academically purposeful activity. When we looked at how we would represent student engagement in our Student Engagement Analytics Platform StREAM, we felt it was important to focus on what students and tutors could actively change, focusing on what students do academically rather than who they are or their background which could be looked at more objectively.
Defining and communicating what engagement means to the university and providing evidence to support its impact on student progression is fundamental to building a common understanding.
We know from empirical evidence that there is a strong correlation between engagement and progression, something that has been well documented by Learning Analytics expert Ed Foster at Nottingham Trent University in his blog Living Learning Analytics. Engagement data has shown that lower engagers are more likely to withdraw, and higher engagers are more likely to progress (on average with a 2:1 grade or higher). Identifying low engagement early could help to get students back on track, get upstream before a point of crisis and provide an opportunity to encourage progression and completion.
StREAM provides data insight to inform tutors on how each student is engaging. Using a powerful algorithm, we turn existing data from digital systems at the university that represent participation in academic activity and convert it into categories of engagement to produce a simple rating from very low to very high and display insight in an easy to access dashboard.
This universal metric can then be applied to how and when tutors interact or intervene to provide encouragement or additional support. The dashboard can also be shared with students to inform their own understanding of engagement, putting the information into the hands of the people who benefit from it most. Over time, data insight builds a picture of what engagement looks like for different learners, what resources they interact with with and when, how engagement compares across different courses and years and how this impacts successful outcomes.
Alerts to changes in engagement can trigger automated messages to students and tutors to take action. Interventions are recorded to measure impact and referrals can help to centralise communication with student support services creating a single point of reference for student’s progress.
We’ve seen many great examples of how data insights are connecting tutors and students; from sending messages to recognise high engagement, providing motivation and signposting to further guidance, enabling tutors to support students early, before they even realise they are at risk of non-continuation and providing timely support.
Neil Bangs, Senior Lecturer, London Sports Institute, Middlesex University commented on his experience of using StREAM for personal tutoring at the UKAT Annual Conference 2022,
‘Engagement insight allows us to respond quickly to our students, particularly those who may be struggling and in need of support. StREAM provides a unique data set that we really couldn’t’ get from anywhere else, saving us precious time and creating operational efficiency. The data is supporting us to activate early intervention and start more accurate conversations that are personalised to each student’.
Engagement data is a vital tool in helping tutors to proactively target students at the right time and at scale. Providing the opportunity to start a meaningful conversation and build trusted relationships in this dynamic environment.
If you attended the UKAT Annual Conference in March 22 you can find our session recording in the event follow up – Keeping students engaged, connected, and motivated in a time of change.
Today’s students have now experienced three years of disruption in their educational experience and Personal Academic Tutors continue to face new and heightened challenges with student engagement as a result of lockdown and remote learning. At the height of the pandemic, disconnection threatened the sense of belonging and wellbeing. According to the Office for National […]
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