Using Learning Analytics System to Communicate with Students with Personlised Emails

Learning Analytics

With the growing size of the class in Monash Business School, teachers have found it is hard to track individual student learning path and maintain quality communication with them as there are simply too many students in the class. More and more communications initiated by the teachers are now sent as a general message to address all students. For example, the same messages are posted on the online forum, sent via SMS, or email to all class participants to reduce the teachers’ workload. Recently, with the innovation in educational technology, it is possible for lecturers to use information technology to draft and send personalised emails to students in bulk according to their online engagement, tutorial attendance records, and assessment results. Learning analytics allow us to identify certain student groups with different selecting criteria and reach them via personlised emails.

Zoee Cohen from the University of Arizona has also been sending personlised emails to students for year 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 of our Business Law units in S1 2018 and the results are very encouraging.

SRES - The Student Relationship Engagement System

The SRES, Student Relationship Engagement System, empowers teachers to collect, analyse, and act on data to better engage students at scale. It was developed by built, run, and supported by a bunch of teachers primarily at the University of Sydney. Monash Biology has set up a server for those who are interested: https://sres.biol.monash.edu/

Here is a short introduction to the system:

Our trial

Last semester we have trailed SRES to send personalised emails to certain student group worked on his BTF5903 unit with 389 students. We think that it improves student engagement as well as their classroom performance. We have attached a brief report here:

Time/Event	Students No. Received Emails	Students No. Read Emails	Student Action
Week 4 before 1stassessment	57 students who did not do more than 4 online learning activities	51	Students finished 3.1 activities on average in the following days.
Week 5 after 1stassessment	24 students who scored 100% in the 1stassessment	23 (3 left feedback to consider the email useful)	2 students wrote back to the lecturer
Week 8 before 2ndassessment	185 students who did not do more than 3 activities in Week 5-7	180 (4 left feedback to consider the email useful)	Finished 2.1 online activities on average in the following days.
The mean student final grade increased by 6.7 and the median grade increased by 8 compared to the previous semester together with other unit design improvements

And here is an example of the email:

Dear XXX

I hope you are well. As you know we will hold our first major assessment for BTF5903, the Mid-Semester Feedback Test, this week.

In the first three weeks there were 8 online Lessons and Quizzes on our Moodle site that you needed to complete. We noticed that you completed 1 of them: that’s no more than 50%! Our past student records prove that those students who fail to complete half of the online learning activities by the middle of semester are TWICE as likely to fail the ENTIRE unit when compared to those who complete more than half of the online learning activities.

We strongly advise you to complete your online Lessons and Quizzes, as well as all other relevant study materials to prepare for the test in Week 4. The test result will contribute to your final grade.

Good luck and see you next week.

Regards

Lecturer

What is not so good?

The system is not integrated with our Moodle yet. We have to export results from Moodle into CSV files and then import those files in SRES.

Would like to try?

If you are interested in using that in your unit this semester, just let us know. All you need to do is to sit with us for an hour to discuss and then we will take care of the system set up, etc. 

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.