The Teaching and Learning Committee has introduced new operating guidelines for supporting student engagement and using the Student Engagement Dashboard.

The Student Engagement Dashboard is a tool to support student wellbeing, for which engagement is a key indicator. It allows us to identify when students’ participation in learning has dropped or is at a level that may cause concern about their progress and wellbeing. It therefore supports retention and success, as well as enabling the university to meet UK Visa and Immigration sponsor requirements.   

The experience of students and staff during 2021/22 has been reviewed and operating guidelines for engagement were developed and presented to the Teaching and Learning Committee in August 2022. The headlines are as follows:  

1. All academic units must use the Student Engagement Dashboard.  

1. The university baseline for an intervention is two weeks of zero engagement without an appropriate documented reason. 

1. Within each academic unit, senior tutors are the academic leads for the dashboard, with heads of school responsible for ensuring roles are appropriately resourced. 

1. Following on from last semester, all schools must use the official university QR code system for capturing attendance at in-person teaching sessions. 

Enhancements to the Student Engagement Dashboard are about to be completed, including a ‘Personal Tutor View’ and a new function embedded in the dashboard to enable relevant staff to record contact and interventions with students. We anticipate finalising these enhancements during the week commencing Monday 3 October 2022, with staff training from week commencing Monday 10 October.  

Pastoral process 

The operating guidelines detail a step-by-step intervention process for contacting a disengaged student. They describe the process flow for contact – broken into the ‘Academic Unit stage’ and the ‘Support and Wellbeing stage’. Timescales have been included to ensure that we are responding in a timely manner to a student who has disengaged from their study. 

To support academic units in contacting students where initial attempts are not successful, a new Student Engagement Dashboard Manager has been appointed in the Student and Campus Life team. You will have the chance to meet this colleague during training and will be able to escalate cases directly through the dashboard.