1.6 Academic Monitoring

Learning Outcome: Faculty can define what practices meet RSI guidelines for monitoring academic progress. 

 Introduction

The federal RSI regulation requires "Monitoring the student's academic engagement and success and ensuring that an instructor is responsible for promptly and proactively engaging in substantive interaction with the student when needed on the basis of such monitoring, or upon request by the student."

There are two parts to this:

  • Holistically reviewing a student's grades and progress
  • Following up with them, either to identify areas of concern, or to let them know they're doing well.

This is a place where "instructor initiated" matters. While students can check the gradebook, hearing from their instructor focuses their attention on how to improve their grade. It also helps avoids misunderstandings and reduces the distance between student and instructor in the online space. 

During your RSI review, you will be asked to write about how you academically monitor your course. You should look to explain when you look at specific assignments and when you look holistically in your class and then what you did with the information you are learning from your monitoring.

 Examples 

The academic monitoring question looks to see how you keeping up with what is happening in the course and what you are doing with that information. During your course, you are assessing student work, giving them feedback, and checking in on how they are doing with the course content. You are looking at both the assignment level information and then you are also looking overall. 

During your RSI review, you can share the different ways you academically monitor and then what you do with that information. It does not need to be a daily account, but it should be more robust than "I checked my gradebook." 

  • Students in my course create grading contracts where they indicate what grade they would like to earn and how they will engage in the coursework to achieve their goals. During week 4, I check in with each student regarding the work they have produced, where they see their effort in terms of their desired outcome, and investigate what support they need to reach their grading contract. 
  • Students are assessed using labor-based grading practices. Three times during the quarter, I ask students to do a self-evaluation of the work and effort they are putting into their assignments, the level of effort they wish to expend on the next set of modules, and the proposed impact of that effort. I then conference with students about how they have stated they have or have not met their goals in terms of the labor-based grading practices. 
  • At least twice during the quarter, I look at the student goals for the course, the narrative feedback they have received on the different assignments throughout the course, and the skills assessed in the upcoming assignments. I send personalized progress reports to students that discuss what I have seen so far in their feedback and learning process and where I hope they engage moving forward. 
  • After the week three assessment, I messaged students who showed a strong understanding to share positive moments from their work. I also emailed students who did not show deep mastery of the material to remind them to read the feedback I provided and come to office hours to chat about how to improve.
  • After the week three assessment, I messaged students who showed a strong understanding to share positive moments from their work. I also emailed students who did not show deep mastery of the material to remind them to read the feedback I provided and come to office hours to chat about how to improve.
  • I compared how students did on the week two quiz and the week three quiz, and then I connected with students. I gave positive feedback to those who made improvements; I connected with students who did better week 2 and checked in on their misunderstandings; I invited the students who did poorly on both assignments to my office hours. 
  • During week 5, I looked at my grade totals. I made sure to connect with any student who had under a 75% through email to check in on how they were feeling in the course, where they needed more support, and to name one thing I saw they were doing well. I ended all of those emails with an invitation to office hours. 
  • After each major writing assignment, I made a course announcement that highlighted the strong understandings from the course as a whole. I referenced back to the diagnostic scores people had on that particular content and noted what new understandings were emerging from the work of the students. 
  • Before week 7, I looked at my gradebook and emailed any student who had under a 70% and / or who had more than two missing assignments. I checked in with how they were doing with the course, what support they needed, and ended with a reminder about office hours and how those could support their understanding. 
  • Before the second large assessment, I looked at the course grade overall and the performance of students on the first assessment. I connected with students who were either not performing well in the course overall or who had not been successful in the first assessment. In addition to inviting them to office hours, I also pointed out three specific resources that would help them prepare for the assessment. 
  • I looked at student course analytics to see how often students were logging in to the material and how often they were engaging in the course content. I used this information to make a plan with specific students about how to manage their time and assignments to complete the work on time. 

 Strategies 

To monitor academic performance, you should: 

  • review the gradebook weekly
    • look at both specific assignments and patterns (patterns across the class and across assignments for each student)
  • identify students who are (and are not) doing well
  • reach out to students directly:
    • offer assistance to students who are not doing well, such as pointers to helpful information or an invitation to office hours.
    • acknowledge students who are doing well and name what they are doing well.

Academic monitoring should go beyond looking at individual assignments and look at the general pattern of how students are doing in the course, how specific students are doing overall, and a holistic view of student performance in the course. Note that RSI doesn't evaluate whether the student acted on your intervention, just that you reached out.

SpeedGrader and the Canvas Gradebook are key tools for tracking student performance and reaching out. For example, you can reach out to a student who didn't submit an assignment by adding a SpeedGrader comment that directs the student to resources to help complete the assignment. The "Message students who..." function in the gradebook enables you to bulk message a group of students whose grades meet criteria you set, like "email everyone whose course grade is below 70."

Monitoring student progress is described in more detail in the Module 3 of the Online Teaching course.

It is always easier to help a student course correct and move forward successfully than to help someone try to "dig" themselves out of a deep hole. It is easier to intervene after one missed assignment rather than try to motivate a student who has missed the last four assignments. Scoring things regularly, giving clear feedback, and paying attention to your course data can help you intervene early and often.

 

Academic monitoring partners well with both 'Proactively inviting students to connect' and with 'Providing information or responding to questions'.  A message about a students' grades or assignments wouldn't be considered substantive, but a message that paired that with content-related information would. For instance:

"I noticed you haven't turned in your last two assignments about the design of your web page. I find one thing that helps me get started with a design is to step away from the screen and start sketching a wireframe on paper. Remember how one of the required items for this class was a sketchbook? Bust that out and have a go. Please drop by my office hours and we can look at your ideas."

"I received your email about a retake on the quiz. Looking over your answers, I noticed that you confused the where clause and the having clause, which is a common mistake when staring out. Last week's homework and study sheet have some examples of the difference between those clauses. There is not an opportunity to retake this quiz. But, there will be another SQL query quiz next week. Those two resources will help you. Please come to office hours or schedule an appointment to chat more."

 

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