What are some of your favorite tools for student and instructor accountability?

Adrian.G.110

Hello!

I am curious what the community thinks are some of the best tools for student and instructor accountability. Things like login times, submission times, feedback response times. Tools that help administrators keep students and instructors accountable.

Thank you:)

Olly.F.893

Now there's an interesting question.

The key thing is probably to base it around the expectations you have of how Brightspace is used at your institution. Each school, college, and university has slightly different ideas of what best demonstrates a good level of engagement with the learning.

For students, you might look at number of system accesses or number of course accesses, content topics visited / completed, posts in discussions, quiz attempts, activity feed comments, and so on.

For instructors, feedback response time is a key thing across all levels of education. If Brightspace is the intended communication tool, then you might also look at number of announcements posted. If Discussions are important, then looking at the amount of replies from instructors can be key, as learners will generally engage more if their instructors are taking part.

Both for students and staff, the thing I'd also consider before accountability is how much they are positively incentivised to do the things you'd like them to do. As an example, does discussion participation result in badges and certificates, for instance? For staff, how can you showcase and recognise great efforts made in using the platform?

One thing I'd be more cautious of is any measurement of 'time spent'. Although Brightspace tries to give an idea of that, no website can know for sure if someone stopped looking at a page but still had it open. Equally, there are ways that they might have downloaded the content or lost connection, but kept looking at the material.

That's just one perspective, but I hope it helps!