Schools are focused on implementing high-level student analytics and intensive advising. While these are positive student success measures, no one understands a course and student performance better than the instructor. Learning Management Systems, such as Canvas, offer some great features for instructors to use to improve student accomplishments.
Over the last two years I have focused on helping students at the course level. I have embedded academic advisors, established roles for TA’s and refined instructor-to-student communications. Instructor-to-student communication in any course is similar to adding memory to a computer. To improve the performance of a computer, the most effective action is to add more memory (RAM). Although there are other upgrades that could be accomplished the addition of memory has the most impact. It can enable an older, slow computer to come back to life. Effective communication with your students will result in lower DFW rates, better overall scores and a better sense of engagement.
The key to communicating with a large student audience is to foster an interpersonal relationship with the student, not blanket them with endless announcements. This is difficult in a high-enrollment course. I have developed a communication plan that uses announcements and direct to student communications. I have also reduced the communication channels to a manageable number to monitor.
I use announcements like most other instructors; to pass information to the entire class. I have schedule announcements that are associated with academic advising. I am not an advisor but I make sure they are aware of academic deadlines. I no longer embed advisors in the course as my school is working on a global advising initiative. I have learned from the academic advisors that it is important that the student understands the academic calendar.
Canvas has a feature in the grade book that allows instructors to “Message Students Who” have not submitted, or are above or below a score or have submitted but the assignment has not been graded. I create an ungraded assignment group where I upload, from Excel, values that can be used to identify students that are behind, doing well and more. I send students a group message that appears to be sent just to that student. What this accomplishes is that my messages reach only the students that need to read the message. I am not trying to send an announcement to all students and breaking out the announcement into parts for each group of students. I have found that students respond to the personal messages at a higher rate than announcements.
With high-enrollment courses that use TA’s, communicating with the students is inefficient. TA’s are not consistent in their response rate and ability to support the students. Students tend to shotgun all TA’s and hope to get someone to respond. I believe that we need to be available when the students need the help. This is problematic as TA’s are limited in the number of hours they can work. We should not expect TA’s to be on call 24 hours a day. I created a single email account that we funnel all student help requests through. The TA’s are scheduled to monitor the email account and respond immediately. This method uses the TA’s time more efficiently and students have an expectation of quick support.
Over the last two years the course content has been substantially the same. When comparing semesters where I used inefficient communication paths against the semester where I applied direct messaging; the semesters with direct messaging had significantly lower DFW rates. Where I compare two direct messaging semesters the DFW rates are consistently the same.
In conclusion, I believe that effective course communication is critical to student success. The instructor student relationship is enhanced and using the tools available in most LMS’s any high-enrollment instructor can effectively create an open environment with students.