Open Education 2017

Lumen's Waymaker platform provides faculty with email alerts about students who are struggling in the course. These emails provide teachers with a simple path to acting on this information. Teachers can act by sending a personal email to the student or by sending a pre-written email tailored to their particular needs.

Information was tracked to better understand faculty behavior with these email nudges, including whether they opened the email nudge or not, whether they sent a message to a student, and whether they enabled or disabled notifications for nudges. Teachers can also choose whether they would like to send a "coach" response or a "regular" response. A coach response is motivating and encouraging; a "regular" response simply relays the facts and invites the students to act.

In order to investigate the effectiveness of these nudges on student behavior and achievement, all student data was tracked as they interacted with resource pages, prior learning assessments, formative assessments, summative assessments, and instructor emails. Using observational study methodologies, we analyzed the data to determine what effect these teacher and student nudges had on student behavior and student achievement.