Meeting Notes 20 Nov 2015

Erin is our Online Student Success Coach

Her presentation was created in a new Microsoft tool called Sway Links to an external site.. Give it a try!

There have been 186 referrals this quarter. 90 were online, 96 were from on-campus courses including the GIGs
Referrals relate to all sorts of things: behavioral, classroom management, technical help, social services needs, and even STAT (see below)
Erin uses various means for communicating with students: Google Hangouts, email, phone, even snail mail
Recommendations for faculty who are suggesting referrals to students:

Put a positive spin on coaching. Don't make it seem punitive. "Famous people have coaches!"
She's working on a syllabus blurb for us to use
Communicate with student first before referral.
Send Erin copies of communications so she knows what's already been done by you.

Create clearer messaging about what the coaches do and don't (or can't) do. They're not counselors, for instance
SEA-Team will include Erin, Nikki and Lianne Almughirah (International Programs)

eLearning is investigating this tool that can be incorporated into Canvas.
Uses an algorithm to highlight at-risk students, based on participation/scores/late assignments. Provides a "risk index" that can be seen by faculty and Success Coach.
Faculty will be able to see past notices about a given student (from prior courses), but can only see info for students in their courses.
She demonstrated screens that show student progress and provide alerts to Success Coach about students who are not succeeding.
This would provide for all information in one place...a place for notes, history, contacts.
The general consensus among the group was favorable. It seems as though this would get help to students faster, avoiding having to do the SEA process.

Ready for Online Learning? is accessible from the eLearning Support Services page, and designed for students who are interested in the Virtual College or an online course.

On the home page, it encourages students to take the Smarter Measure assessment to see if an online course is suitable for them.
Then, the Modules have pages and links that address the various deficiencies (life factors, technical knowledge, learning styles, etc.) that might have been pointed out by the Smarter Measure survey.

"Welcome to Your Virtual Campus" course is accessible to any student who is enrolled in an online or hybrid class. Students are automatically registered when they register for one of these courses. If faculty want to see this course, they'd have to request access as an observer. Contact eLearning if you want to do that.

We asked how to track this. She suggested possibly trying badges or getting list of students who did Smarter Measure.

Erin's comment about STAT (Shoreline Threat Assessment Team) led to a short discussion about how to determine where to send students for various situations. Here is a link to the STAT referral guide Links to an external site.that will help you in these situations.
We had a short discussion about various types of textbooks (open source, eTexts, etc.) Some felt that eTexts weren't yet advanced enough to allow for good learning. Some of us use open source materials in lieu of textbooks.
We also had a discussion about cheating in online courses...how important is it to call students on cheating and what's preventable/not preventable....Here's a few notes about that:

Many of us make our "quizzes" low-stakes, so if students cheat (either share or look up information), it's not going to help their grade that much.
Respondus doesn't really help to keep students from looking things up, as it only controls the device on which they're taking the quiz.
Asking students who are suspected of cheating to visit the instructor and talk about it seems like a good approach. Some students do follow through, but others don't.
Suggested to tell them "If you cheat on this quiz, then it will be more difficult for you to do well on the bigger assignments later on."
Claire wondered whether academic dishonesty might be a topic for a Professional Learning discussion.

Watch for a message from Judy re: Next meeting AND our Retreat!

TO DO:

Possible future meeting about using Badges and maybe Gamification. Contact Amy R and Brian K, possibly also guest speaker who spoke about it at NW eLearn.
Share notes from NW eLearn
Update/remodel the SeLC Canvas site