How to help university professors track students: Manager/Team setup? Power user rights? Something else?

  • 30 August 2022
  • 7 replies
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llo
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  • llo
  • Novice III
  • 13 replies

We do primarily partner and end customer training, but we have a fair number of universities who integrate our courses into their curricula. We have tried to use the Manager/Team functionality to let professors assign courses and track their students’ progress. Unfortunately, they are NOT fans of this solution. They were a bit turned off because it is very clearly designed for managers. Besides that, they had two main complaints:

1. They can’t group their students by class (they just appear in a bit lump on the dashboard)

2. They can’t assign due dates for courses.

 

Is there something very obvious I’m missing about the “My Team” functionality that could make the experience better? Otherwise, I’m considering setting up Power User profiles for the professors, but am afraid that might lead me to an administrative nightmare.

 

Anyone have has success implementing something similar? All ideas are welcome! I’m totally at a loss.

7 replies

dklinger
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@llo - I hate to say it - I think the organizational paradigm is not aligned because by design the LMS wasnt meant for that relationship/role. Other LMSs shine at the classroom instructor/student concept. The built in functionality wont match well because it isnt designed for it. So you begin to monkey it...and I can literally hear your professors sounding off.

That said, you may be able to come up with a Poweruser Profile that gives you a better match and you can leverage the built in instructor role with courses to collect and grade assignments.

Good luck. (Sorry - I dont mean to come across like I am popping any bubble).

dandrews
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I was going to suggest an unique Power User profile too. You could also make them instructors for courses and then they will have the ability to see reporting, assign due dates, etc. Just another thought!

llo
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Good luck. (Sorry - I dont mean to come across like I am popping any bubble).

Don’t worry. That bubble burst long ago. :D I have more or less given up on getting what we really want here. But I figured maybe the community would have some creative solutions I hadn’t thought of.

My background is in academia/higher education, so I also have a soft spot for this user group and would like to give them an experience they love.

I think I’ll try to go the power user route and see what comes out of that.

 

Thanks for the advice @dklinger and @dandrews !

C
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This is exactly what I’m dealing with as well. Unfortunately, I don’t have a good solution.

Ideally, our content should play in their platform (Moodle/Blackboard Learn/Google Classroom), via LTI or some other integration. Then assigning courses and tracking progress would happen in the system the school was using anyway.

However, we lack the expertise and resources to set this up...

Our workaround:

  • We created instructions for professors on how to share courses with their class
    • If needed, we create a list of links for them
  • On demand, we create automatically scheduled reports for the professors
    • Professors send us the list(s) of students, we create a group per class
    • We send them a sample report with recommend the metrics but will also adjust the report to their needs if possible. Usually we use the “user-courses” report type.
    • We schedule the report according to their preferences, usually once a week.
    • Housekeeping: we agree on a deletion date for the groups and reports, usually at the end of the term

This seems to be working quite well. I am extremely hesitant to go down the power user route, and so far we’ve been able to avoid it. 

dklinger
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  • We created instructions for professors on how to share courses with their class
    • If needed, we create a list of links for them
  • On demand, we create automatically scheduled reports for the professors
    • Professors send us the list(s) of students, we create a group per class
    • We send them a sample report with recommend the metrics but will also adjust the report to their needs if possible. Usually we use the “user-courses” report type.
    • We schedule the report according to their preferences, usually once a week.
    • Housekeeping: we agree on a deletion date for the groups and reports, usually at the end of the term

This seems to be working quite well. I am extremely hesitant to go down the power user route, and so far we’ve been able to avoid it. 

@Ceeee - as long as it works for you? Then? that is great. Lists get notoriously stale, but if you can keep the story afloat? Then that is awesome.

A question for you - how are you using courses to support that student/instructor interaction?
Is there a concern about “access control” with other courses? Where I know that you can make a particular group only eligible to see certain courses - I would imagine those students that are swimming around may have an interesting experience.

 

C
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- as long as it works for you? Then? that is great. Lists get notoriously stale, but if you can keep the story afloat? Then that is awesome.

A question for you - how are you using courses to support that student/instructor interaction?
Is there a concern about “access control” with other courses? Where I know that you can make a particular group only eligible to see certain courses - I would imagine those students that are swimming around may have an interesting experience.

We’re mainly a hardware company, so a lot of our content focuses on our products. In most cases educators use our content to teach their students about using our products before students are allowed in the workshop. Students therefore usually only need access to the content for one term, we can remove their access & reporting on their progress afterwards. 
Our e-learning offering is also not that big: 4 end customer learning plans and about 20 additional courses. And as students have clear instructions and motivation to complete the right course -because, in the end, they want to gain the practical experience, not just take e-learning courses- we thankfully didn’t have to deal with students taking all the wrong courses. (I do understand this issue, though, this happened with LinkedIn Learning internally- people took all kinds of courses except the ones related to their profession.)


We do have a special landing page for education customers with the recommended courses and additional resources which we built based on interviews and surveys with educators. We sell a special subscription to our software for education customers and use automatic groups based on additional fields to identify them. 

As for the lists: The course offerings are very stable, we update the content when new products are released but otherwise don’t make changes to our core offerings. Therefore, yearly updates to content lists are sufficient.

As for the groups used for reporting: we only create them if there’s a definite deletion date, usually after the semester. Otherwise, this would quickly pollute the platform. 

llo
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Userlevel 3

This is exactly what I’m dealing with as well. Unfortunately, I don’t have a good solution.

Ideally, our content should play in their platform (Moodle/Blackboard Learn/Google Classroom), via LTI or some other integration. Then assigning courses and tracking progress would happen in the system the school was using anyway.

However, we lack the expertise and resources to set this up...

Our workaround:

  • We created instructions for professors on how to share courses with their class
    • If needed, we create a list of links for them
  • On demand, we create automatically scheduled reports for the professors
    • Professors send us the list(s) of students, we create a group per class
    • We send them a sample report with recommend the metrics but will also adjust the report to their needs if possible. Usually we use the “user-courses” report type.
    • We schedule the report according to their preferences, usually once a week.
    • Housekeeping: we agree on a deletion date for the groups and reports, usually at the end of the term

This seems to be working quite well. I am extremely hesitant to go down the power user route, and so far we’ve been able to avoid it. 

The whole process would actually be a lot easier with some kind of integration with their system! I do have the skills in my team, but unfortunately no bandwidth to look at it (especially since this is a secondary audience for us). Maybe one day.

I totally didn’t think about scheduled reports in this context. Those excel sheets are still kind of a pain, but at least they wouldn’t have to fumble around the “My team” page.

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