Exploring StREAM@Leeds with your tutee:
Student Learning Journey Three

In the final part of this three-part series of student journey examples, our tutor continues to demonstrate how introducing StREAM@Leeds data into Academic Personal Tutor meetings could benefit students. In this journey, the tutor explores how Notifications can be used to support students.

Whilst examples are based on real interactions all names and data have been anonymised.

Our student

Wenji is an international student in the final year of undergraduate study. Towards the end of Semester One, he triggered a Notification and received an email from his school's SES team concerned about his engagement with digital resources.

Wenji's trigger for the meeting

After receiving the email, Wenji arranged a tutorial meeting to discuss how he could better engage with the course, as he had concerns he was falling behind. Wenji was a new tutee for our tutor who had not yet attended an Academic Personal Tutoring meeting, so they didn't know him as much as the other students.

Preparing for the meeting

Prior to their meeting, our tutor decided to take a look at Wenji’s StREAM@Leeds Dashboard to get some background on his situation. On the CURRENT ENGAGEMENT tab, our tutor was quickly able to spot the Notification icon on Wenji’s Learning Journey Map (a purple line with a clock icon).

Our tutor clicked the INTERACTIONS tab, where they could see that Wenji had triggered a Notification for not interacting with any digital systems for seven consecutive days (noted as No Digital Activity 7+ Consecutive Days). Our tutor knew that at this point he would have received an email from his school's SES team to check in with him to make sure everything was okay.

Using the Learning Journey Map to check engagement against peers

Not knowing Wenji as well as their other tutees, our tutor was interested to see how he had been engaging with digital systems so far this academic year. Moving back to the CURRENT ENGAGEMENT tab, our tutor used the date pickers above the Learning Journey Map to change the date range for the Map to the start of teaching up until the Notification was triggered, and toggled Cohort Average on so that he could see Wenji's engagement alongside the cohort average. Our tutor noted that it was interesting to see that although Wenji’s Engagement Ratings appeared to generally keep pace with his cohort’s averages for most of Semester One, there had been a steady decrease in activity beginning around week eight that did not match the digital activity of his peers.

Using the meeting to support and identify ways forward

During their meeting the following week, Wenji mentioned that he had already looked at his StREAM@Leeds Dashboard after receiving the email from his school SES team, and agreed to discuss his learning analytics data together. Wenji’s Engagement Ratings had already begun to increase since the Notification was triggered. Wenji credited the increase to the Notification, saying receiving the email from his school SES team helped him to recognise that he wasn’t doing as much as some of the others on his course.

This triggered a wider discussion of how he was generally feeling studying on the course, to which Wenji admitted to our tutor that he had been disappointed with some of the assignment marks he had received mid-semester, and that this may have led to his digital engagement dropping. Our tutor was then able to advise Wenji on seeking further feedback on these assignments, as well as signpost him to additional academic support for future assessments.

 

Conclusions

Overall, our tutor felt the Notification triggered by StREAM@Leeds, and the resulting email from the SES team had a positive impact on Wenji. During their meeting they were able to use the Notification flagged on Wenji’s profile to identify possible reasons for his drop in digital activity, thus allowing our tutor to recommend support and guidance relevant to him.

The positive impact of the Notification was also apparent when looking at Wenji’s Learning Journey Map at the end of Semester One, as it appeared that directly after receiving contact from his school SES team, his Engagement Ratings begun to again mirror his cohort’s average lines for the remaining week of teaching.