By Linda Sherwood

Without a set day and time, students can easily forget about an online course, but features built into Ferris Connect, and most course management systems, can help professors track down those missing students with just a few clicks of the button.

Instructors can help remind students about the online course with a variety of methods including welcoming e-mails before the class starts and again during the first week and even phone calls. But once the class is in session, tracking down students may be forgotten as instructors and (most) students focus on the current lesson and assignment.

In the past, I have used a Word document form to help me keep track of my online students. The form allows me to list all of the names of the students. I tend to print off my forms, and I write my notes in by hand.
In my online class, discussion is pretty important, and the number of messages can quickly add up. I make it a point to participate in the discussion, but I don’t try to reply to every posting. To make sure that I reply in a fair manner, I make a note of who I respond to each week. It is just a check mark in a column, but it makes it easy for me to look back and see if I’ve neglected any students. The next week I make it a point to read that student’s posts first, which increases the likelihood that I’ll reply to that student.

But the print out of my Word document is clunky, and I was sure there were other instructors with great ideas that I wanted to know about. With that in mind, I queried the Writing Program list-serv offered through Arizona State University.

Some instructors rely on the CMS tracking reports to identify missing students while other instructors create their own documents in either Word or Excel to gather information about classes as well as keep track of information about student habits and needs.

While the tracking system makes it easy to keep track of a student’s attendance, most instructors see the data offers more information than just noting if students are logging in.

A lecturer at California State University, Dave Katherine Ireland used information he gathered from introductions and tracking data to learn more about his students. The information he collects helps him structure his course. For each class he teaches, Ireland creates an Excel document where he records introduction information and access patterns noting which students work in the morning, afternoon, night or late night. From this data, Ireland identified a group of students he calls his “weekend warriors.”

“My weekend warriors are students who work full time, raise families and go to school full time,” Ireland said. “I do not structure my classes so that all the work and class interactions can be done on the weekend, but my weekend warriors always save what they can for the weekend.”

Ireland also uses the “course statistics” function to revise his curriculum. “I can evaluate whether or not I need to collapse or expand the time line for a specific assignment based on how I see the course working through the different parts of an assignment,” Ireland said.

Mary Patricia McQueeney, an instructor at Johnson County Community College in Kansas, finds tracking features have helped her revise the curriculum in both her online and face-to-face courses. “Some of my colleagues have ethical dilemmas about Big Brother tools,” McQueeney said. “I don’t because they allow me to help my students far more than they turn me into a voyeur. “

Tracking tools can help instructors determine when students are logging into class, how long they are spending, and where they are going. These tracking tools can do more than help instructors make sure students are attending their virtual classrooms. Analyzing student patterns can help instructors improve delivery and organizational methods.

McQueeney said, “I use the tools for both online and on-campus students to make sure that what they think they are doing they are, indeed, doing.” She also finds the tools helpful for her “to try to figure out how in the heck confused students are rambling around the course shell.”

An English professor at Collin College, Sonja Andrus has figured out the best times to track student participation based on research and experience. She noted the first two weeks are important to make sure everyone understands how the online course works. Andrus calls or e-mails any student who fails to sign in or has signed in only once. “[R]esearch shows that online students who feel disconnected in the first week or two will drop later at a rate of 3 times higher than those who were clued in at the beginning,” Andrus said.

“I check back in on this at about week 4 or 5 and contact any students who have missed major elements of the course,” Andrus said. “I usually check against those logging in and viewing some things but not turning anything in, too.” She notes that weeks 4 and 5 are when face-to-face and online students tend to stop coming to class. “Students tire of the class schedule or get bored or think the class is too hard/too easy and they ‘stop out’ and later drop or get an F. If I contact those students before it’s too late, I can usually get them interested in class again.”

Derek Mueller, a doctoral candidate at Syracuse University, uses a one-page Excel document to keep track of grades, attendance and missing work. “I appreciate that in the spreadsheet I can see the full roster along with email addresses, geographic locations, programs of study, and so on. In the various columns, I am able to input notes that pop-up on a mouseover action (using Excel’s note feature), and I can enter alphanumeric values and add highlights or color-coding to keep track of a particular assignment.”

While most of the respondents taught English, one instructor, Ilene Frank from the University of South Florida reported how she handles her online classes including one with a cap at 100 students. “It’s a short course on using library/internet resources,” Frank explained. She noted many of the assignments are set up to grade automatically, but she still tries to e-mail students quite often.

“I send welcome messages via e-mail to get started – and then about a week in, send a reminder of what we are supposed to be doing – and after that, send e-mail only to students where work seems to be missing,” Frank said. She relies on the statistics available for the discussion threads to help indicate who is logging on, but she said the biggest signal of a problem is when “there are no grades in the grade book.”

Editor’s Note: This article was written for and published in Ferris State University’s online writing newletter called L and L onLine, which is published by the Language and Literature department. It was published in the April 2009 edition, which is available here: http://www.ferris.edu/htmls/administration/academicaffairs/online/OTC/apr09.pdf