The University of Worcester is committed to improving student retention and supporting students to achieve their full potential and a working group has been formed to develop a strategy and plan to deliver on these goals.
Many of the strategies and approaches addressing this issue are at a University or course level however, there are some simple ways in which everyday use of the VLE can help. Blackboard’s built in Retention Centre can identify students who may be struggling and enable tutors to apply interventions to encourage engagement and address any issues at an early stage.
The HEA’s What Works? Strategies for Student Retention and Success Programme (2017) reported “Monitoring individual participation, engagement and performance and following up students emerged as essential ways to improve retention and success. These include:
– Attendance data;
– Data on participation in co-curricular activities;
– Interaction with the virtual learning environment (VLE);
– Institutional survey data;
– Module or course evaluations.
(Professor Liz Thomas, Michael Hill Dr Joan O’ Mahony Professor Mantz Yorke April 2017)
This blog post takes a look at how tutors can quickly and easily access information from the VLE to see how their students are engaging with the learning materials and activities provided, and shows how to intervene if necessary.
“Improving retention and success is central to teaching excellence, and is a policy priority across the UK for moral, economic and legal reasons.” (ibid)
The Retention Centre provides an easy way for you to discover which students in your course may be at risk through lack of engagement with the VLE.
To access the Retention Centre go to the Course Management area, expand the Evaluation tab and select Retention Centre.
There are four preconfigured rules based on deadlines, grades, activity and access and these will display by default when you open the Retention centre. Students’ engagement and participation are visually displayed, quickly alerting you to potential risk.
You can also toggle between students not at risk to give you a full picture of how the class as a whole is engaging.
The Retention Centre also gives you the option to monitor students and if necessary, you can communicate with struggling students directly from Blackboard and help them take immediate action for improvement.
The default rules in the Retention Centre may not be appropriate for all modules, depending on whether you are using deadlines, grades or interactivity, but the access rule can be a very quick and easy indicator of whether students have logged into the Blackboard module.
You can customise the Retention Centre so that irrelevant criteria are removed from the risk table. To do this choose the Customise button from the top right hand corner of the page.
Select the criteria you would like to exclude, choose actions and select exclude from risk register. Your risk table will now only show the students meeting the desired criteria.
If you require any further help or advice on using the Retention Centre in Blackboard please contact eos@worc.ac.uk.