As course facilitators it is imperative to ensure that students are successfully meeting the learning goals in our courses. Thankfully, Blackboard has made it easy to gather insight into our students’ performance via the Retention Center tool.
The Retention Center can use default rules, or rules that we create according to the areas we prioritize the highest, to visually show us students’ engagement and participation.
From the Retention Center, we can flag students we wish to closely monitor, as well as communicate with struggling students to help them take immediate action for improvement. The Retention Center can also be used to reward students for their hard work based on improvement or continual submission of exceptional work. We could even use the information found in the Retention Center for setting up student mentors, assigning group membership, or finding teaching assistants to aid in our students’ learning opportunities.
All correspondence and any related notes we make about each student are saved within our courses. This caveat helps to both reduce our amount of email as well as make future referencing easy as all student information is contained in one area – inside our Blackboard course.
Student satisfaction, success, and retention can all be tied to supportive faculty interactions. By utilizing Blackboard’s Retention Center we can more quickly and easily see how our students are progressing and then communicate with them as is applicable to help support their learning.
Please feel free to reference this 5 minute video providing directions on how to set up and use the Retention Center today!
Looking for more tips on Blackboard tools? Visit the Faculty Blackboard Support page on the Academy website and find the heading “Blackboard Tips, Tools, & Resources for Faculty”. Click the toggle to view a list of topics with a quick write-up and/or short video for each topic.