Checking and improving student engagement
Seeing how students engage with your online course can help you understand what is working well, what may need improvement, as well as whether there are any technical problems to address.
Here, we provide a few different options for you to try. Wherever possible, we recommend starting with tools you are more familiar with.
Broadly, there are 2 ways to see how students engage with your course. We also provide some advice on how to improve engagement if it's not what you would like it to be.
Blackboard provides a number of ways for you to see your students’ activity in the course space. For example, you can see when your students have last accessed the course.
If you have uploaded videos on Replay, you can see how many views they have had, when, and how much of them people are watching.
There are various ways to ask your students how they are feeling about the course, what they like, what they don't like, or whether there are any issues. The ways we recommend are non-assessed.
How will you ask them?
Quick surveys are best used to understand what students like or dislike, or what technical issues they may have.
- Log into Blackboard.
- Go to your course / organisation.
- Create a Form.
- You can view and export the results.
Things to consider
- By default, Blackboard forms are not anonymous and you will see which students have completed them. If you need a form to be anonymous, tick Anonymous submissions under Marking & Submissions in Assessment Settings.
- Although with the anonymous setting enabled respondent names are not shown, if very few students fill in the survey, you may be able to deduce who gave which response, compromising the anonymity.
- We recommend you leave the Mark form option unticked, so that the form will not be graded.
- Blackboard forms are completed in the relevant Blackboard course.
- Open Forms and log in if you need to.
- Click on New Form to create a survey, or Copy an existing one by clicking on ... and selecting Copy.
- Enter a title and a description for your survey. Make both informative, so students understand why they are filling out this survey.
- Click on + Add new question to add a question and select the type you would like. Multiple choice (with Multiple answers disabled or enabled), Text and Likert type questions will most likely be the best options.
- You can create branches by clicking on the dots ... at the bottom right and selecting Add branching. This means you can have a question that only students that gave a specific answer to a previous question can reply to.
- Once you are done, go to Settings and select whether you want to record students' names (uncheck Record Name for anonymity), whether you want only one response per person (uncheck for weekly surveys) and to customize your thank you message.
- Click on Collect responses, then Copy link to get the link and include that in the part of your Blackboard course you would like students to access the survey from. This might be the beginning or the end of a section, depending on what you most want to understand.
- See a summary of your results by clicking View responses. You can see individual responses by clicking View results and clicking the arrows to browse through different Respondents. Click Back to go back to the summary.
- You can export your results by clicking Open in Excel and opening the downloaded file. Make sure you keep this safe, especially if it might contain personally identifying information.
Things to consider
- Please remember to make a conscious choice about survey anonymity by checking or unchecking the box to record names.
Here are some ideas for the kinds of questions you could ask your students:
- How do you feel?
- How are you feeling about your online studies at the moment?
- How do you feel about accessing the course?
- How do you feel about the content?
- Start-Stop-Continue
- What would you like us to START doing?
- What would you like us to STOP doing?
- What would you like us to CONTINUE doing?
- One thing
- Please tell us one thing you really LIKED last week
- Please tell us one thing you found DIFFICULT last week
- Please tell us one thing you had TECHNICAL PROBLEMS with last week
Things to consider
- Anonymity: We recommend having anonymous surveys, potentially with an optional question for the student to include their name, in case they need follow up with a specific technical problem.
- Data protection: If you export the data, please make sure to keep it in a safe location and ensure you are aware of GDPR. The university provides GDPR training.
This could be used as a weekly, asynchronous and brief interaction that helps to check engagement before the serious topics of the week. It helps give students a sense that there are other students participating in the course.
There are many tools you can use to collect results, including a shared document like MS Word, or a Padlet board. We’ve used Mentimeter, which is easy to use and presents results in a visual way.
You could ask for a quick response to a prompt, in the form of: “what three words come to mind when you think about XX”.
Confidence scales can also work well for this kind of task, for example “how confident would you feel explaining XX topic?” or “of these two topics, which are you most confident about?”
Or you could ask a ‘big question’, for which there is no wrong answer, and collect responses. For example “what is your one main concern about running online discussions”?
- Go to mentimeter.com, create a new account if you don't have one already and login.
- Select the New Menti dropdown and choose New Survey.
- Choose Start from scratch and add questions from the New slide dropdown.
- Once you have created your question(s), you can get a link by choosing Share in the top right of the screen. From there, you can copy a link, or a QR code, for students to submit their answers.
- You can view the results by clicking Results at the top. In order to share the results, click Share, copy the code on the right of Embed slides and add it to an HTML block in a Blackboard Document in your course. The embedded results will update every time someone submits an answer.
Your students may well respond to your calls for feedback, so once you have your information, what should you do with it? There are many different patterns of activity from students in a course, so there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution. However, these are some ideas for what you might do if you encounter the following:
A: Perhaps start by reaching out to them in an Announcement. Remind them that they should be checking the space, and tell them what they should be doing there (for example posting in the discussion, accessing materials, completing tests). For some students, a weekly announcement saying what needs to be done in the course can be a useful prompt.
You might also want to find out more with some follow up questions. Are they unclear where to find things in the course? Do they need more help to use the tools?
A: Think of your course space as a work in progress; if something isn’t working, what can you do to change it? The Digital Education Office have guides on course design to help you. Often, the problem is about the menu not being clear or consistent. Consider adding instructions on how to navigate the course in the Welcome section, so that students know where to look.
A: Perhaps consider what kind of interaction you expect, and whether you’ve made that clear. You might need to add some easy ‘warm up’ activities or Blackboard Discussions to get students engaging. Another option is to use Release Conditions, which requires students to complete a task before they get the next set of materials. This can be set up in a number of ways, for example students have to post in a discussion before they can progress. Adding marks or grades for participation is also an option. You could consider allocating marks for discussion posts, which you can set up by making the discussion ‘gradable’.
Consider your own presence in the course too: are you modelling the interaction you would like to see in discussions? Is your course space an active place for your students to participate in?
You can also see our guides focused on student engagement.
Do you think something is missing from this page? Please let us know what that is by sending the details to digital-education@bristol.ac.uk with the Subject: Staff Guide Missing Info-Checking Student Engagement so we can add it.