Student Engagement System Business Action Group 9 Feb 2012

Last week I attended the Student Engagement System Business Action Group.

The student engagement system is a piece of software that monitors individual student’s engagement with the University.

It does this by collating information from a number of sources as follows.

1. Records of assessments received and those that may be overdue.
2. SiD activity
3. Logins to Blackboard
4. Logins to e:vision
5. Novell logins
6. Library – taking out of books.
7. Swipe / auto-readers in lecture rooms

The system has just been updated and we now want to encourage all students to swipe when they encounter a reader. Could all course leaders please make sure that their students are aware of the importance carrying their cards and of swiping as standard.

We currently have two types of reader, first the standard swipe reader, but also a small number of auto-readers where students do not need to swipe, the reader picks up on the chip in their cards, so they only have to be near enough for it to trigger.

The Polhill readers are as follows.

P0.32 – auto reader
P0.33 – auto reader (thus the students do not now need to swipe when using these rooms – the swipe readers are redundant)
D1.01 (theatre) - swipe reader
P0.50 – swipe reader
P1.01 – auto reader
P2.04 – swipe reader

The Business Action Group would like to receive any suggestions for other locations that would improve the chance of recording a student’s presence on campus. Currently, if students do not enter any of these locations they will not be recorded. Suggestion can be passed directly to me.

The card readers are not attendance monitors and so it is also important that normal attendance records are also kept.

The software calculates an overall engagement factor. It would be helpful to have any opinions from course leaders on how this data might be used. Again, please contact me by email with suggestions that I could pass onto the group.

Phil Wright 13th February 2012.