Supporting student success with learning analytics at Abertay University
Learning analytics and attendance monitoring have become an established part of timely and proactive engagement for Abertay students at risk of leaving.
Abertay University has been using learning analytics and attendance monitoring since 2015 and was one of our ‘pathfinder’ customers.
James Nicholson, director of student and academic services, and his team recognised that the different data they had in the organisation would help them with retaining students and possibly identifying students at risk of leaving.
A challenge early on from a group of ethical hacking students helped Abertay to refine, appreciate and apply the central ethos of learning analytics and engagement monitoring for their institution. When those students challenged what data was being held on them, Abertay reassured them they would not hold protected characteristics nor use data to profile.
And in the process of explaining usage and outcomes, they unlocked what the system meant for the institution and the people using it:
“Learning analytics and engagement monitoring isn’t punitive, it's supportive, it's about identifying students who the university needs to reach out to. Whether there might be something going on in their life, where reaching out will be helpful for them to either continue on their studies or be directed towards support.”
As James explained, they’ve continued to evolve their understanding of retention as an ongoing requirement, but within the remit of support and engagement:
“It's not about keeping everybody and not letting them go. It's more about trying to be helpful and supportive. That helped us in terms of putting things together. As an institution, we recognise that actually what learner analytics does, is it helps us focus intervention around student welfare.”
However, Abertay’s use of student success officers in recent years has brought the most significant step-change to their processes.
Student success officers
During the pandemic, Abertay created the student success officer role, recruiting people who have just graduated for a fixed two-year period, to stay current with the student population:
“They'll know what's going on. They may still have people that they know in the years below them”
Each faculty’s student success officer reviews the data on a weekly basis and identifies those students who seem not to be engaging after ten working days. Before they reach out to a student, they contact programme module leaders (the faculty’s term for an academic advisor).
The first thing that the student success officer does is text the student:
“We know that text is the most effective way of getting somebody to respond because students tell us they're more likely to respond to a text than a phone call or an email.”
Student success officers will try and engage with the student via text and arrange a time to follow up with a phone call.
If none of those things work, when the student gets to 15 working days of non-engagement, the Student and Academic Services Team will reach out via email. This acknowledges the previous attempts, the university's academic regulations and gives a time limit (normally five working days) to let the university know whether there's something they can do to support them, or they will be withdrawn.
James estimates about two-thirds of students who haven’t engaged up to this point respond to that email. When they respond, the faculty academic advisor and the student success officer are also copied in so that everybody knows what's going on.
Sometimes people are more worried about coming back in after some time away, and the reaction to their return. In these cases, the student success officer will meet with the student and go to their first class with them.
International students
The system is set up a little differently for UK visas and immigration (UKVI) because the Home Office require an attendance engagement policy for international students. In this case, an alert will go to their compliance officer, who will then contact people and remind them of their responsibility. This email works differently, as it is addressed ‘from’ visa compliance and this automation is particularly useful for audit purposes and to demonstrate process to UKVI compliance.
Academic faculty support and interventions
When the upgraded learning analytics was launched to existing users in 2024, as a long-term user of learning analytics, James wanted to recognise all the Jisc team has done as part of the upgrade:
“The old system wasn't as user friendly as it could be and the team recognised the community feedback that the user experience (UX) needed to improve. They deserve recognition for the great work that they've done. It's made my life much easier, and it's made my life in selling it to academic staff much easier.”
Abertay brought in timetable data as part of the upgrade which made it easier for programme module leaders to understand what's going on for their group of students.
When programme module leaders write their annual reports if they see there's an issue in a cohort, they can go back and have a look at the data and see what the issue is and come up with potential solutions.
“In the virtual learning environment (VLE), we know that some students just go in, hang around and then go out again. Just because you viewed something doesn't mean you're engaging with the materials.”
Viewing the metrics has also usefully impacted how programme module leaders schedule workload for their students:
“They might note no students coming to classes during a key time, and they may note that, actually, another module over there had an assessment that week. So it can help academic staff be more effective in terms of when they deliver content.”
Their programme board also uses the data when considering progression, retention and resits. James believes they reach decisions efficiently and with more confidence as a result:
“We can see from the data that sometimes a person hasn’t told us that they've left. Before a decision is made to grant a resit, the programme assessment board is provided with the dates of last engagement (in person and on the VLE). Having access to the data has helped the boards be more effective in their decision making.”
James has adapted his views during Abertay’s journey with learning analytics and attendance monitoring, moving away from his initial desire for more and more automation:
“I realised that if it's a barrage of scheduled messages, students are just going to ignore it because they recognise it's just a computer... and then when you really want them to take notice, they continue to ignore things.”
Learning analytics and attendance monitoring do not replace in-person interaction and intervention, but it is an important element of the academic eco-system:
“There's a balance between automation and human intervention, which is why when the student success officers send the texts, students understand that it's a real person asking about their health and welfare, they’re more likely to respond.”
Find out more about our learning analytics and attendance monitoring services.