Students perform better academically and have a better college experience when they feel that their professors care about them. But that feeling is far from guaranteed when students find themselves in a class of hundreds, as many do, especially in gateway courses and high-demand majors.
The professors who teach those large-enrollment classes know this, and many make a concerted effort to show students they are more than just numbers. They strive to learn students’ names — or at least use them, even if they’re reading from a seating chart, because research suggests that doing so matters. They send personalized emails about how students are doing — another research-supported practice — even though doing so might require teaching themselves how to do a mail merge. They scan students’ written reflections and provide classwide feedback highlighting the main themes.
Such efforts to connect can make a real difference, especially for first-generation or underrepresented minority students, who may be less likely to feel at home on campus. But they require already overtaxed instructors to put in even more time. Even when professors have a good supply of well-trained TAs, some parts of this work fall to the instructor of record.
What if there were an easier way?
A group of professors at the University of Sydney, in Australia — where many courses enroll hundreds of students and some instructors teach thousands each semester — have created a tool to streamline and automate many of the personalized professor-student communications that can be difficult for individual instructors to provide at scale. The tool, called the Student Relationship Engagement System, or SRES, has been used by some 3,600 instructors at the university, and a few other institutions are using it on a smaller scale, says Danny Liu, the tool’s main creator, an associate professor in educational innovation in a central faculty-development unit. He is working to license it free of charge to colleges around the world, and notes that it works with both Canvas and Blackboard.
SRES, which got underway about a decade ago, is all about customization: It lets professors input whatever data they wish from existing university systems, their own grading spreadsheets, and the like, and then create a variety of automated, personalized messages. A professor can use SRES to send a batch of encouraging emails offering support to students who got below a certain score on a test; a teaching assistant can use it to see, while taking attendance, how students did on their last quiz.
The idea here isn’t simply to record grades or manage workflow; and the goals aren’t laser-focused on retention or student success. The word “relationship” is in the name for a reason: This is all about allowing students to feel noticed by their instructor. The best analogy might be a customer-relationship management system, like businesses use, says Liu. But the relationship isn’t the one between the student and the university — it’s the one between the student and a particular teacher.
The tool allows professors to efficiently get in touch with struggling students who might otherwise fall through the cracks. And it lets them to quickly give more personalized feedback than students have come to expect in a very large class. Instructors who use it report that their students feel more connected. Sometimes students write back as if the messages were a personal correspondence.
The story of SRES suggests that instructors with mega enrollments can have a much greater impact when they have the right kind of tools — attuned to relationships and pedagogy, not just data — at their fingertips, and the support to use those tools.
‘Continual Conversation’
In many cases, professors at Sydney who use SRES are first drawn to it because attendance is low and they want a better way to track who’s coming to class.
Samantha Clarke, an academic developer who is part of the core team behind the system, uses that first conversation as an opportunity to encourage professors to do more. Why not add a couple of check-in questions to that attendance scan? That will quickly give instructors a sense of how well students understand the material, or how they’re feeling. “So it’s not just about bums in seats,” she says. “It’s about having that continual conversation.”
The system, in other words, can do more than make professors’ lives a bit easier; it can encourage them to make improvements in the classroom, too.
Some instructors have become super users.
Danika Wright, an associate professor of finance, takes a data-driven approach to running her 500-person class on investments and portfolio management. But SRES allows her analytical method to feel friendly to students.
Wright has a team of TAs grade student work factory-style, putting codes for very specific feedback into a spreadsheet. Through SRES, this analysis of student work can be paired with data from the learning-management system to show, for instance, if a student did the practice problems related to an assessment. “But they’re seeing this nice, warm, fuzzy, their-first-name-being-used email, sent directly from me to them. So they don’t know that it’s actually a robot system; they’re getting a connection to myself.”
Since the system was initiated, students’ pass rates have gone up between the first and second assignments. The improvement has been especially strong among less-advantaged and underrepresented students.
Wright shared an example of one such email, which breaks down a student’s performance on an assignment, providing scores for each piece and reasons for them, like “Your response in this section has potential but there are still ways for you to improve it, particularly thinking about how you link your arguments from the preceding sections together to build a compelling case.” The message closes with “Thank you for your hard work so far in FINC6017, and best wishes for the rest of semester!” and is signed “Danika.”
Okay, students may know on some level that this feedback is automated, Wright acknowledges — but it feels personal. They still write heartfelt notes back. They’re not used to getting this level of response from a professor. The student who received the email Wright shared above wrote back thanking her for the “detailed feedback” and added “I personally really enjoyed the class so far, and looking forward for new knowledges and skills I could learn in this subject.” Some students, Wright adds, click a link at the bottom of the message that allows them to comment through the system, leaving notes like “Thank u Danika. This feedback on the report is fantastic.”
Since Wright initiated this system, she says, students’ pass rates have gone up between the first and second assignments in the course. The improvement has been especially strong among less-advantaged and underrepresented students.
Another business professor, Maria Ishkova, has used SRES to provide different forms of feedback in her course, which focuses on soft skills. Students evaluate one another’s contributions, and she uses the tool to automatically collect, aggregate, and share the anonymous feedback in a student-facing portal. Ishkova, a lecturer in work and organizational studies focused on education, also sends students personal messages about their specific, individual classroom contributions, encouraging those who haven’t spoken much in class to do so, and requesting that students who do speak up a lot to play a leadership role by encouraging their classmates to chime in more often.
SRES can be used for other institutional purposes, too, like letting departments set parameters to identify students who are struggling academically. The system then delivers personalized messages to the at-risk students from a professor rather than a general email address. This was a particular concern at Sydney after the government adjusted the country’s financial-aid system so that students who dropped below a 50 percent pass rate had to pay their full tuition cost upfront until they improved their grades. (That measure will soon be removed.)
In one project, professors from several colleges worked to identify at-risk students and have someone from their own faculty send an email. Some 1,200 students were emailed over four semesters.
Students who “ghost,” or just stop participating, are a challenge for the university. The email effort helped keep some of them from falling through the cracks: Among those who responded to the messages, most had a problem they were trying to solve — they were trying to unenroll and go somewhere else; they were having a problem in their personal life; they hadn’t been able to log in to the system to take a quiz — and had not been able to connect with a university employee who could help them.
Stephen George-Williams was part of that outreach as the unit coordinator for math and science. He also used SRES to send messages to students within his own unit, targeted to how well they were performing.
As with the larger effort, he heard back from some that yes, they were struggling. Some of those students came to see him. That wouldn’t have happened before, he says, because students are often too intimidated. The numbers of such responses are low, he says, but “they’re incredibly important.”
Counseling a student in that position is extra work; and it doesn’t always result in student success that a college can brag about. Sometimes a student just isn’t in a position to do their coursework right now, and the best move for them is to take a break. The real power of SRES, George-Williams says, is creating conditions where he can reach the “handful of students that are collapsing” and “either stop them from getting thousands of dollars of debt, or getting them over the line for the pass.”
It is possible to make students in large courses feel like they’re more than a number. But their instructor also has to believe it — and then have a good way to communicate it to the student.
