Have the students read and reacted on my personalised emails?

Personalised Communication

The most commonly used communication methods between teachers and students these days probably are Moodle Forum announcement and mass email. But how effective the methods are? Are the students reading those notifications and mass emails? 

The answer normally is: we do not know. Normally we do not have any method to track whether the students have read the emails. But often when we talk to the students, we might have the impression that they are not very interested in those messages. It is hard to blame them as many of us might have the same attitude to similar messages in our mailbox.

However, students might have different attitudes to the personlised emails from their lecturers' Monash email address. Zoee Cohen from the University of Arizona has also been sending personlised emails to students for years and seeing improvement in student academic performance: Small Changes, Large Rewards: How Individualized Emails Increase Classroom Performance.

TaLT has tried to answer that challenge by trialing using a learning analytics system to communicate with students with personlised Emails with one Business Law unit and one Econometrics and Business Statistics unit. The project Using Learning Analytics System to Communicate with Students with Personalised Emails was presented at the Monash Re-engineering Education Teaching Symposium last month. You can read more about their work in our TaLT Practice Papers series. 

Does it work?

We have used the SRES, Student Relationship Engagement System, to send the personlised emails to the students. The system has a function to track whether the students have opened the email. From the logs, it is safe to say that almost all students would open the emails. It is not that a surprise as we can imagine that we would check the emails from our department heads.

However, have the students read it? Have them acted accordingly? The questions are still not answered.

SETU as a test

Students are encouraged to answer the SETU questions about their units at the end of the semester. The Monash Business School average response rate is 40.63% in S2 2018. We took the chance and did a small experiment in the two units. A persoalised email addressing the student first name from the lecturer's email address was sent to all students to encourage them to complete the SETU questions. 

One unit got 81.88% response rate from 138 students and the other unit got 87.76% from 384 students. Both response rates are much higher than the Buseco average and have significantly increased from the previous year.

It is now safe to say that yes, the majority of the students would read personalised emails from their lecturers and they would act on the email content in terms of completing a SETU online survey.

Getting more students for the department

One of the lecturers Charanjit Kaur has sent the newest email to high achieving students in her units. The email congratulates the students on their excellent performance and invites them to choose more advanced units in Econometrics and Business Statistics in their 2d semester on behalf of the Acting Department Head. The email is formatted as a formal letter so that students can print it even use it as part of their portfolio during job applications. 

Also, we will find out whether the personlised invitation will bring more students into EBS next semester. And if you would like to keep up with the student enrollment competition with EBS using personlised messages or any other new ideas, please talk to your Educational Designers. We would be very happy to assist you in the new year.