Introducing the Engagement Monitoring project

10 Aug 2020

Developing a system to record and report student attendance at learning events

As we begin to move towards a blended model for teaching and learning, with student activities taking place both in person and online, having a robust and consistent mechanism of monitoring student engagement across all delivery modes will be vital. Not just for the obvious teaching and learning benefits, but also so we can proactively monitor student wellbeing.

You may have recently heard references to a project looking at 'engagement monitoring' as part of the Student Experience Programme. I’m pleased to confirm that this project is now fully established and the first phase will go ahead over the next few months. Many thanks to joint project leads Dan George and Louise Walmsley, and the project team, for getting us to this stage.

About the project

The first phase of the Engagement Monitoring project aims to develop a University-wide system to record and report student attendance at learning events. This will provide a user-friendly and consistent experience for students, and help us offer early support to those who appear to be disengaging from their studies. It will also make it quicker and easier for colleagues to administer student attendance and engagement, and give you more insightful reporting to aid future planning.

This new system will ultimately be used by Professional Services and academic staff across many different areas and teams. To ensure a variety of views are considered as the system is designed and built, the project team includes a 'reference group' of colleagues. They will provide direct input from different roles and areas as the project progresses. Of course we will also involve students directly in the project, working with our student partners from the Student Experience Programme on both the design and testing.

Indicative timeline

At the moment, the indicative plan is to design and build this new system over the summer and early autumn this year, with testing in October and November. Provided this all goes well, the current aim is for the system to be gradually rolled out across Schools and teams from December and into early 2021.

This is just the beginning for the Engagement Monitoring project. We hope that once the new system is established across the University in 2021, we’ll be able to develop and build upon it to provide further functionality and benefits.

Further information - please share

Click here to download a presentation pack with further information about the project structure and its aims, benefits and timeline.

Please feel free to share this with others in your teams who may be interested to hear about this work. We know this project will be of interest to lots of colleagues and we want to ensure that everyone is aware of what’s happening and is able to feed in their views.

We’ll continue to share regular updates as this first phase of the project progresses.

Professor April McMahon
Vice-President for Teaching, Learning and Students