Announcements to Promote Student Success

Communication is key for student success.  This is particularly true for online courses where a sense of community is a key factor in student retention and achievement.

Found under the Course Tools in Blackboard, the Announcement tool is an excellent way of increasing communication with your students and to build a community of learning that is key for student success. 

To create an announcement, just click on the tool to view all the previous announcements and:

1. Select the Create Announcement button.
2. You will have to get the announcement or title or “subject”.  It is helpful to make these brief and to the point.
3. The content editor will allow you to add:
1. Text
2. Hyperlinks
3. Youtube videos
4. Photos, or
5. Anything else you can add create with the content editor
4.   The Web Announcement Options will give you the option to immediately publish or set a time for the announcement to be revealed.  You can also choose to email the students the announcement.
5. The course link can also link the announcement to a specific content page or assessment. 
6.  Don’t forget to hit ‘submit’.

Now you know how to use the announcement tool here are four tips to use it better:

1. Regardless of whether you teach a traditional, hybrid, or online course, using the Announcement tool is a create way to keep the students engaged in the course. It offers a tool for sending reminders that can keep the students focused and on track with the course.
2. The announcements offers you a better way to reach out to your students. The phone app pushes announcements to students’ phones to ensure they get the message.  Likewise, by choosing “Send a copy of this announcement immediately” you can also send the announcement to their college email as well. 
3. Minimally try to release an announcement once a week.  This helps keep their mind on the course and increases student engagement.  You might want to pick a specific time (such as Monday morning coffee hour) to be the regular time you send out a course announcement. 
4. You can create an announcement for each week all at once in the beginning of the semester, and set each announcement to be revealed on the appropriate week – using the Date Restriction feature.  This way you can set up a regular set of announcements to remind students of milestone events all at the beginning of the course.  This front-loading the course with announcements is a smart choice that can free up more of your time for teaching and less on administrivia.  You can then go about teaching knowing that you can add specific announcement messages when the need arises. 

By taking advantage of the Announcements Tool, you can foster a sense of community in your course, keep the students focused on their tasks, and contribute to your student’s success.   

The Delivery of Digital Content from Textbook Publishers Matters

Digital content supplied by publishers is convenient for faculty to adopt and studies show students support its inclusion in courses. It also affects a significant number of students. In the 2016-17 school year, 60% of students polled stated they accessed the publisher web content while taking college classes. While this contributes to the rising costs of textbooks, and increases the value of Open Educational Resources, there are times when the digital content is advantageous. For example, sometimes there are no appropriate OERs available for the content that is necessary and the digital content may be the only academically acceptable option. Likewise, if the school has mandated the use of the book, or the text is already needed for the course, the content is merely a free addition.

It may be clear that the predeveloped content makes it easier for instructors to offer online content. Further integrating the content with an LMS allows the content to seamlessly interact with the LMS and its gradebook. Nevertheless, this is not an issue about learning and pedagogy, but out of convenience. A simple pedagogical question arises with digital content from textbook publishers that is often not address.

Does integrating digital content from textbook publishers affect the performance of students in online literature and writing courses and do students prefer it?

In a pilot study, Wolf and Richardson (2018) investigated this very issue. They ran a pilot study on a class testing the performance and student preference of integrate textbook digital content. The study investigated variances student progress and preference of textbook publisher digital content between the modes of delivery. In general, publisher digital content can be accessed by either hyperlinking to the publisher’s website or integrating the content within the LMS. There are two ways to integrate the content and they are:

• Plug-ins. These suffer from required updates and poorer user experiences 
• Learning Tool Interoperability (LTI). This for is a direct link to the content is its stability makes it more preferable. 

The study use Pearson REVEL. The only integration option was to use a plug-in. Consequently, the study compared the differences of the plug-in with simply hyperlinking the material.

After setting the conditions to control the experiment, the pilot study revealed that:

·       Students performed better when the content was integrated with a plug in

·       Student rate of completion was also better when the content was integrated

·       Students also preferred the content integrated

There was also an unexpected result. There was a small percentage of helpdesk calls from students requesting assistance with the digital content. This has the added benefit of both:

• having students spend more cognitive time learning the material and less on navigation 
• Freeing up man-hours from the IT department 

While more study is required, the study is one of the first to confirm that evidence suggest that students will perform better when the have less impediments in navigation. Integrating publisher digital content, instead of sending them to a labyrinth of pages on the publisher’s website reduces some cognitive load and encourages students to spend more time in the learning environment. Consequently, it contributes to a large level of student success.

Reference

Wolf, D. & Richardson, A. (2018). Assessing the Pedagogical Effectiveness and Student Preference of Publisher Digital Content Presentation in Online Literature and Writing Instruction. In Proceedings of E-Learn: World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education (pp. 355-359). Las Vegas, NV, United States: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).