As you prep your course for an upcoming semester, consider your course delivery strategies. Specifically, how can you proactively plan to be present, monitor your students’ progress, and make data-driven decisions to improve student persistence? Attention to your students’ behaviors is critically important in online and online accelerated course environments. Proactive planning can provide timely interventions and outreach and can also help make informed revision decisions for future iterations of our course.

Step 1: Proactive planning for presence

A proactive approach to presence in your online course considers and schedules course-wide and individual strategies before students enter the online classroom. Ideally, your messaging should be timely, well-planned, and draw attention to what is most important to student success.

If you’ve not yet taken the time to craft a weekly presence plan, this can be a great first step in increasing your presence during the upcoming semester. First, brainstorm a few presence strategies that you will use weekly. Then, after reviewing the weekly organization of materials, assessments, interactions, and activities, mark the most strategic time to implement that presence strategy on a weekly basis.

Here’s an example:

Strategy	M	T	W	T	S	S
General announcements	✓			✓	✓
Office hours		✓		✓
At-risk check-ins			✓		✓
Shout-outs			✓			✓
Mentoring		✓

In this example, the instructor has prioritized general announcements for the whole course three times a week. Scheduled office hours are also offered twice a week for all students. Additional shoutouts, either provided in announcements or discussion boards, are scheduled twice a week. The instructor has prioritized individual check-ins for at-risk check-ins as well as mentoring opportunities for interested students.

These individual strategies are best implemented when proactively monitoring student progress.

Step 2: Monitoring student progress

In addition to proactively planning your presence, it’s also critical to consider intervention strategies for students who may be struggling. Tracking key milestones that indicate online students’ level of participation and understanding of course materials can prevent them from falling behind or dropping your course. Some key milestones you may consider including are:

LMS logins: Recency & frequency
Submission rate: What percentage of assignments have been submitted weekly?
Academic success rate: Grades on individual items and as a weekly total

Feel free to supplement or replace these milestones with other important indicators in your course. Once you’ve identified milestones, you’ll determine levels of success at each milestone. For example, if tracking logins, success levels may look like this:

Milestones (Weekly)	Exceptional	Adequate	Needs improvement	Immediate intervention
Log-ins	At least 7 log-ins	At least 5 log-ins	At least 3 log-ins	Less than 3 log-ins

Tracking these milestones helps you identify which students require outreach. You can then modify your outreach strategy depending on the level of need. In addition, as students progress through the course each week, planned strategies may change and adjust depending on the course and content.

Week 1

Milestones (Weekly)	Exceptional	Adequate	Needs improvement	Immediate intervention
Log-ins	At least 7 log-ins	At least 5 log-ins	At least 3 log-ins	Less than 3 log-ins
Submission rate	100%	75%-100%	25%-75%	0%-25%
Academic success rate	90%-100%	75%-90%	60%-75%	0%-60%
Communication strategy	Personalized welcome	Personalized welcome that highlights course expectations.	Personalized welcome and invitation to phone call or office hours.	Request to meet or join phone call. Email alert to academic advisor.

Weeks 2-3

Milestones (Weekly)	Exceptional	Adequate	Needs improvement	Immediate intervention
Log-ins	At least 7 log-ins	At least 5 log-ins	At least 3 log-ins	Less than 3 log-ins
Submission rate	100%	75%-100%	25%-75%	0%-25%
Academic success rate	90%-100%	75%-90%	60%-75%	0%-60%
Communication strategy	Personal message of encouragement	Open invitation to join office hours or schedule one-on-one.	Request one-on-one or phone call to discuss progress.	Multiple requests for one-on-one. Alert academic advisor.

Weeks 4-5

Milestones (Weekly)	Exceptional	Adequate	Needs improvement	Immediate intervention
Log-ins	At least 7 log-ins	At least 5 log-ins	At least 3 log-ins	Less than 3 log-ins
Submission rate	100%	75%-100%	25%-75%	0%-25%
Academic success rate	90%-100%	75%-90%	60%-75%	0%-60%
Communication strategy	Open invitation to join office hours or schedule one-on-one.	Request one-on-one or phone call to discuss progress.	Request one-on-one or phone call to discuss progress. Personalized list of support opportunities at university.	Multiple requests for one-on-one. Provide support opportunities. Update academic advisor.

Weeks 5-7

Milestones (Weekly)	Exceptional	Adequate	Needs improvement	Immediate intervention
Log-ins	At least 7 log-ins	At least 5 log-ins	At least 3 log-ins	Less than 3 log-ins
Submission rate	100%	75%-100%	25%-75%	0%-25%
Academic success rate	90%-100%	75%-90%	60%-75%	0%-60%
Communication strategy	Request one-on-one or phone call to discuss progress & provide encouragement.	Request one-on-one or phone call to discuss progress. Personalized list of support opportunities at university.	Request one-on-one or phone call to discuss progress. Personalized list of support opportunities at university.	Multiple phone calls or texts. Provide support opportunities. Update academic advisor.

Tracking this data and intervening at key milestones can help you provide optimal support to your students and modify your presence plans for future semesters. In addition, you will have an excellent set of data that indicates student performance across an entire semester. This can help inform future course revision strategies.

After the course concludes and the semester data has been reviewed, consider the following questions:

What weeks do logins increase? When do they decrease?
What weeks have low submission rates? What weeks have high submission rates?
What weeks have low academic success rates? What weeks have high academic success rates?
Do you recognize trends between submission rates and academic success rates week over week?

Using the answers to the questions above and after tracking this information over three terms, you can then consider possible revisions to the course based on rigor, alignment, practice, preparation, or provided resources. For example, if a course consistently sees academic success rate decrease in Week 4, possible curriculum revisions could include increased outreach or the addition of a practice assessment in the preceding week. After revisions have been made, continue to track the data for an additional three starts before revising again.

Other data to consider

The key milestones discussed above are not the only types of data that can be used to best inform decision-making. Your learning management system provides opportunities to run reports to learn more about student performance and activity. Use the links below to explore data and reporting opportunities in your LMS.