Faculty Get On Board
To monitor how engaged their students are, faculty members use Inspire for Faculty, a dashboard-style app that displays relevant data from the Illume platform. Using these metrics, teachers are then able to intervene with at-risk students before it’s too late. “Students who don’t reach some level of engagement relatively early in the term almost always drop out,” said Schaefer. “By the time they start receiving grades, it’s too late to really influence low-engagement students.”
Identifying students who are at risk is one thing; keeping them in school is another. And therein lies one of the great advantages of Strayer’s system: Faculty members themselves are charged with re-engaging students who are drifting away.
“Strayer represents what I would call the best of student-success science,” said Milliron. “The university realized that it can’t change demographic variables, but it can change engagement. By giving the data to the front lines, it allows the faculty to innovate and run different experiments to see what kind of messaging, interventions, and inspirations work.”
Faculty have the ability to reach out individually or to target particular groups, as necessary. According to Schaefer, these interventions take the form of phone calls, e-mails, text messages, even videos. With each passing year, Strayer faculty learn what messages and actions work and which fail to move the needle. “Our faculty can see the payoff almost immediately,” said Schaefer. “If a faculty member sends out an e-mail with different subject lines, for example, he can see the impact of each on student engagement, potentially the next day.”
To ensure that successful strategies bubble to the top, a newly created faculty leadership team will begin harvesting tips from the top-performing lecturers and sharing them among the rest of the faculty. Schaefer stresses that these tips are intended as helpful strategies, not mandates. “We very much encourage faculty to use their voices and what they’ve learned, but we want to get better at offering suggestions to accelerate that process,” he said. “We have faculty who are really thirsty for more concrete tips from other faculty.”
Faculty Coaching
Just as Illume shines a light on which students are becoming disengaged, it also reveals those faculty members who are failing to engage their students adequately. According to Schaefer, this information is shared with the faculty members’ managers and used by Strayer’s directors of teaching and learning to provide coaching as needed.
Faculty coaching is just one example of how what started as a student-retention initiative has exploded into a remake of Strayer’s entire educational approach. A new group, known as Strayer Studios, is now trying to reimagine online learning with a view to making courses more—you guessed it—engaging. “The vast majority of our students are working adults, and we’re competing for their available time with their families and with Netflix, for that matter,” said Schaefer. “Our courses have to be a lot more fun and exciting.”
As Schaefer sees it, online education has been too focused on effectiveness, with too little time spent making the material appealing. The result, he notes, is the woeful dropout rates seen in online education today. “Online education needs to be exciting in order to drive higher engagement and higher results,” he said. “We’ve got to stop blaming the demographics of the students and assuming they came in under-prepared from high school or anything else for that matter.”
Andrew Barbour is a contributing editor with eCampus News.
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