Student Online Attendance

I was delivering my last few weeks of F2F teaching and in one class I had 7 out of 70 and in another 20 out of 100. This does not annoy me as students are responsible for their own learning. If they do not take opportunities for learning they either do not need them, or they are making their lives harder later.

For the online learning I have found that there is also a problem with regularity of attendance. I had a few problems at work that have increased stress levels and meant that I have not been as committed to the course for a few weeks as I had been before. This was compounded by problems with the internet. In F2F you can see that people are not there and you can know what commitment they are making. Online it is harder to know. We need better tools to monitor student activity on the course. We need to make sure that is is spread evenly over the different components. So for example if students do not access learning materials this should be flagged up by the system to the tutors. Tutors need an effective dash-board to help them manage the course. Without this finding out how students are doing will be too time consuming and this leads to disaffection with the course on the part of the tutors as well as the students.