Embracing a campus-wide culture of student success helps ensure each student is given every opportunity to succeed. Proactive intervention is one tenet — and an effective one — of a comprehensive student success strategy. Faculty are uniquely positioned to move the needle on student achievement and persistence by employing proactive outreach strategies when students are struggling, creating personalized assignments, and creating a classroom culture of belonging.
Proactive outreach can take many forms, from course progress alerts to meeting one-on-one with students and more. Faculty and staff have a wealth of tools at their disposal to play a role in impacting student success, including tools in Blackboard to ensure students are informed about their progress in their courses and create personalized learning experiences.
Let’s take a look at a few Blackboard tools faculty can use to help foster a campus-wide culture of success and help build students’ sense of community by not letting them fall through the cracks.
Personalized First Week Assignments and Activities
Creating Week 1 assignments that give students the opportunity to share personal information and insights can go a long way in building a culture of caring and belonging. Throughout the years, I’ve employed a number of community-building assignments students turn in via Blackboard. One is a get-to-know-you form I create via Forms in Blackboard. I ask them to share details such as preferred name, pronouns, strengths, concerns for the upcoming semester, and a favorite hobby, movie, and song. It’s an easy assignment they can start the semester off strong with, and it helps me connect with them personally. I can rely on this information to create connections with them throughout the semester. For instance, I create a Spotify playlist of all their favorite songs, and I play that before each class period while students are filtering into the classroom. They notice it.
Other options include video introductions or written autobiography assignments. If you’d like these to be shared privately with you, you can use the Assignments feature paired with Kaltura to have students create a video introduction, or they can type a written response if you prefer that approach. You can also create an opportunity for students to engage with one another via the Discussions feature by giving students the chance to share introductory details either via text or video and ask they read and respond to each other in the Discussion boards.
Discussion Boards
The Discussions feature in Blackboard is a great way to build community in your classroom. Regular discussion activities (graded or ungraded) encourage students to engage with each other, you, and the course materials.
To help address any course questions, you might also create a thread for course questions where students can drop their questions throughout the semester, giving you or other students the opportunity to respond.
Ongoing Journals
Blackboard Ultra has a Journal feature that provides a private way for students to communicate with you. You can create regular journal assignments for students to engage with throughout the semester or encourage them to use the space to reflect and ask you questions.
Regular Communication
Maintaining regular communication with students throughout the semester can give students a sense of belonging, drive success, and enhance their feeling that their instructor cares about them. Blackboard has several ways to communicate with students.
Announcements are a great way to share information vital to the entire course. Changes in due dates, important reminders, class meeting location changes, etc., are good reasons to utilize announcements. You can schedule announcements ahead of time or send them on the fly. You can also push the message to your students’ UARK email addresses to increase message visibility.
Messages is a new feature in Blackboard Ultra that allows you and students to communicate within the platform. This feature keeps all of your course messages consolidated in one easy place, saving you time from having to sort through your email inbox (although you can send messages to email inboxes as well). Students can send you private messages here, and you can respond to those messages. You can also send messages out to individual students, groups of students, other course instructors, or the entire class from this feature.
Class Conversations
When you create assignments, you now have the opportunity to enable Class Conversations. This feature provides a discussion board attached to the specific assignment where students can ask questions so that you or other students can respond and provide clarity.
Automatic Zeros
Blackboard Ultra’s gradebook allows you to enable the Automatic Zeros feature for missed deadlines. When enabled, this tool will populate the gradebook with a zero for the assignment that is missed. You are able to override it later if you accept late work.
Enabling Automatic Zeros is a proactive way to let students know they are underperforming and hopefully prompt them to submit late assignments or reach out to you for assistance. This feature also saves you time from having to manually enter zeros and also gives students an accurate representation of their grade to date.
Student Performance Notifications
You can send automatic messages to students who are underperforming in the course. This feature can be set up in the Gradebook settings. You can customize the alerts based on grade thresholds, number of missed due dates, and last access to the course, as shown in the screenshot below, which is found in your Gradebook settings.
Setting this feature up will help you proactively and automatically intervene when students are underperforming, hopefully prompting action or further communication from the student.
Send Assignment Reminders
Within the Gradebook views (Gradable Items, Grades, and Students), you can send messages to students to remind them of assignment deadlines or that they have missed an assignment. Below is an example of how you can send this message from the Grades view of the Gradebook.
This feature allows you to quickly and proactively send messages to students about upcoming or missed assignments to help keep them on track or reach out for assistance if needed.
Analytics
Blackboard Ultra has myriad ways for you to view student progress in the course via Analytics. These analytics can tell you everything from how much time a student is spending in the course to performance analytics per test question and more. Periodically reviewing analytics can give you insights into how your course is performing and how students are performing in your course, so you can adjust as needed and reach out to students who may need additional support.
Final Thoughts
Faculty play a critical role in driving a campus-wide, proactive approach to student success. And this proactive approach doesn’t have to be time consuming. Blackboard Ultra helps instructors save time with tools and assignment types that help streamline notifications and communication and build community. By using these tools in combination with other campus resources, faculty can help improve academic achievement and a sense of belonging, leading to better student and campus outcomes.
Watch Demonstration of this Content
During a TIPS for Teaching with Technology Faculty Lunch, sponsored by TFSC, Kelly Westeen provides a demonstration of each of these tips, plus some extras!
September 2024 TIPS Teaching with Technology Lunch