Online Student Onboarding?
Hello all,
Is anyone working in Higher Education doing an online student onboarding or orientation? We are in the process of building an online student orientation, and we are interested in the process of getting them enrolled when the are accepted as a student (not when they are registered for classes).
We are also interested in creative ways you may be engaging your online students. Are you using badges or gamification? Any info or help you can provide would be great!
Best Answers
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Hi John,
At Athabasca University, we use a continuous enrolment model for our undergraduate courses. Each month, our Brightspace support team uses the the Bulk User Management tool to bulk create Brightspace accounts for all new registrations (prior to them having course access) and then we use the same tool to bulk enrol them in our Undergraduate Student Orientation course where we use H5P activities and badges to promote higher student engagement. We also use an intelligent agent to enrol all new students in our Learning in Brightspace course where we also use both H5P activities and badges.
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Hi John,
We do have an orientation portal in Brightspace that we use, We usually have our academic advisors enroll prospective program students into the orientation portal using the bulk enrollment feature.
We do use awards for privacy training that are automatically given out when they have completed the privacy training modules. We also have used intelligent agents to unenroll them after they complete the program.
Answers
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eCampus Ontario offers a great micro-credential on Digital Fluency for post-secondary learners in their open library. This mc would be a great place to get started.
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Hi! One tool I LOVE for engagement are Intelligent Agents. These are automated messages you can set up in advanced based on many available options or "conditions". I use these emails in my onboarding course for to accomplish many purposes - making sure they are accessing the course on a regular basis, congratulating them on great quiz scores, sending check ins at various stages of their enrollment, and much more. I create custom memes to include in each of my messages, and I have received lots of positive feedback from my learners that they really enjoyed the memes and felt motivated to complete their various onboarding assignments and discussions because they felt rewarded when they got a message at these various milestones. (Attached is a meme I made to congratulate my learners who completed an intro to HTML micro-module).
Here is some more info:
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We use both awards and microcredentials, along with what we call our donuts. How the donuts appear are the attached video. The D2L creative team made this for us. They are circles that get filled in as students complete certain mastery assignments. We also like using the personalization aspect of the LMS.
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Thank you all, these are great answers and very helpful!
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We developed what we call a success kit in D2L that includes H5P elements to make the learning more interactive. We used different elements to walk the students through how things work within D2L. In our success kit we auto enroll any new students as well as let students use discover to join the shell. See an example below.
