Leverage Blackboard for Light-Tough Intervention

"Overall, our results suggest that a light-touch intervention that increased professor engagement significantly improved students' perceptions of the professor in the course, and the course performance of underrepresented minority students in their early years of college." (Scott Carrell and Michal Kurlaender, "My Professor Cares: Experimental Evidence on the Role of Faculty Engagement," 2022)

"Light-touch" interventions such as timely and supportive emails from professors can go a long way toward helping students feel cared for and looked after, especially in large enrollment courses where professor-student interaction may be less frequent. Thankfully, with minimal training and set-up, professors can leverage Blackboard to facilitate these efforts.

The tools involved are distinct to the Blackboard platform you use for your classes. Most classes at WSU are still hosted in the Blackboard Classic course format, but increasing numbers are moving to Blackboard Ultra. If you are not sure what your course format is, it's very likely Classic.

If you teach in Blackboard Classic, the tool you need to look for is called the "Retention Center." The Retention Center allows you to track many aspects of student behavior including logins, grades, and overall activity. While some of these metrics are more useful for hybrid and online courses, even in-person courses can benefit from Retention Center metrics if the Blackboard course area is used for assignments, tests, and/or content delivery. The out-of-the-box settings are excellent, but if you want the Retention Center to do more, you can also customize the rules in each monitoring category to fit your needs. Professors can also easily select specific at-risk students for dashboard monitoring. Best of all, the Retention Center makes it easy to send automatic emails to students based on rules you set yourself. Your students can then receive praise for high achievement and support when they stumble, and the emails they receive are crafted by you, so they reflect your voice and personality.

If you teach in Blackboard Ultra, you have a few options for both bulk and individual messages to students. In the "Gradebook" area under "Settings" (indicated with the gear icon), you can have your students automatically receive alerts in their activity stream on the basis of number of days since course activity and/or when a student's grade drops below a pre-set overall grade percentage. While the automatic messages are not customizable, Ultra makes it very easy to send bulk messages to students on the basis of course activity as well. To do that, click "View Course Activity" in the same Gradebook settings area, and then sort your students by overall grade, hours in the course, or days of inactivity. Then tick the box next to the names of the students you want to reach with your message, and choose the "Send Message" button. There you can craft an individual message to your selected students. (Note, you can also get to the "Course Activity" area by clicking on "Analytics" in the top menu ribbon.

Like all technology, the pace of change in these Blackboard tools is fast. If you find you need help setting up your automatic messaging and/or sending personal messages manually, reach out to us at OIR, and we can get you on the road to success!