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I'm a professor. My university bought a big piece of enterprise software, designed precisely to track and boost student success in various ways. The software s

I'm a professor. My university bought a big piece of enterprise software, designed precisely to track and boost student success in various ways. The software sent me an email asking me to do something, ostensibly from someone in our advising center, signed by my assistant chair instead, but obviously corporate-sounding and autogenerated. It reeked of fakery. Is this sort of thing supposed to accomplish something?

myfavoritedog 5y ago
Yes, the people who sold the software to the university made a ton of money.
Loughla 5y ago
That tells me you have a team of people who have not done their jobs, or let too many decisions be made by committee. We have a large piece of software at our institution that communicates automatically with students, staff, and faculty based on various triggers (grades, dates, etc). The hardest part of that process was writing the messages. It took 1 semester to get the system operational, and two years to dial in the messaging. The worst thing you can do is create a "specific" message for an individual with generic language targeted at groups. Which, subsequently, it seems is what most institutions do. No idea why. It's easier, I suppose?
toast0 5y ago
> The software sent me an email asking me to do something, ostensibly from someone in our advising center, signed by my assistant chair instead, but obviously corporate-sounding and autogenerated. It reeked of fakery. This is like the definition of phishing.
fallingknife 5y ago
Yes. What it accomplishes is to abuse the trust you have built with your students through genuine interaction to spread their corporate (ok university. Same shit) propaganda by making it seem like it comes from you. Most people can smell that from a mile away so you should absolutely not do it if you care about the respect of your students.
ineedasername 5y ago
It depends on how it's implemented. These systems can work, but they require very tight coordination & buy-in from faculty as early as the procurement stage. Schools that just buy & force them on faculty don't achieve much. The types of messages faculty get like that are usually a check-in where they're asked to give a status report for each student. This can be a quick good/ok/bad type of thing, or it can be something like a brief survey. My personal opinion is that the first option is best: These systems should put as low of a burden on faculty as possible. I really minimalist implementation that is almost as good is to ask faculty to only flag students in trouble. What this should do, if the college has properly implemented it, is trigger the advisor to reach out to students struggling to determine 1) Why and then 2) What can be done to help: tutoring, assessment of whether the course is really required, determination if the course can be withdrawn from if not required or if the student is beyond the point of recover, or should have taken a pre-requisite or lower-level course in the subject first, etc. If your college has not communicated this sort of thing to you, they are doing it wrong. I would still encourage you to do what is asked unless it is a very large burden. If that's the case, reach out to the advising unit overseeing these initiatives to understand how they're using it. But if it's not too much of a burden, even if they've done a poor job communicating with faculty, it may trigger a meaningful intervention with the student. Even if it doesn't, it will still allow collection of data that can be analyzed to determine trends, the significance of whether these activities by faculty correlate with student success, etc. And if they do, that will then be used to feed back into the advising process that these things are actionable to the benefit of students. These systems can work. In my current job, after implementing such a system we saw first-year drop outs decrease by about 6%.
1shooner 5y ago
>The software sent me an email asking me to do something, ostensibly from someone in our advising center, signed by my assistant chair instead, but obviously corporate-sounding and autogenerated. It reeked of fakery. So did you do the thing? Did it improve a student outcome? The 'fakery' is just a string that could be updated. Telling you what needs to happen and for whom is the critical function. But then again getting faculty to play ball often may as well be cold fusion...

myfavoritedog 5y ago

Yes, the people who sold the software to the university made a ton of money.

Loughla 5y ago

That tells me you have a team of people who have not done their jobs, or let too many decisions be made by committee. We have a large piece of software at our institution that communicates automatically with students, staff, and faculty based on various triggers (grades, dates, etc). The hardest part of that process was writing the messages. It took 1 semester to get the system operational, and two years to dial in the messaging. The worst thing you can do is create a "specific" message for an individual with generic language targeted at groups. Which, subsequently, it seems is what most institutions do. No idea why. It's easier, I suppose?

toast0 5y ago

fallingknife 5y ago

Yes. What it accomplishes is to abuse the trust you have built with your students through genuine interaction to spread their corporate (ok university. Same shit) propaganda by making it seem like it comes from you. Most people can smell that from a mile away so you should absolutely not do it if you care about the respect of your students.

ineedasername 5y ago

It depends on how it's implemented. These systems can work, but they require very tight coordination & buy-in from faculty as early as the procurement stage. Schools that just buy & force them on faculty don't achieve much. The types of messages faculty get like that are usually a check-in where they're asked to give a status report for each student. This can be a quick good/ok/bad type of thing, or it can be something like a brief survey. My personal opinion is that the first option is best: These systems should put as low of a burden on faculty as possible. I really minimalist implementation that is almost as good is to ask faculty to only flag students in trouble. What this should do, if the college has properly implemented it, is trigger the advisor to reach out to students struggling to determine 1) Why and then 2) What can be done to help: tutoring, assessment of whether the course is really required, determination if the course can be withdrawn from if not required or if the student is beyond the point of recover, or should have taken a pre-requisite or lower-level course in the subject first, etc. If your college has not communicated this sort of thing to you, they are doing it wrong. I would still encourage you to do what is asked unless it is a very large burden. If that's the case, reach out to the advising unit overseeing these initiatives to understand how they're using it. But if it's not too much of a burden, even if they've done a poor job communicating with faculty, it may trigger a meaningful intervention with the student. Even if it doesn't, it will still allow collection of data that can be analyzed to determine trends, the significance of whether these activities by faculty correlate with student success, etc. And if they do, that will then be used to feed back into the advising process that these things are actionable to the benefit of students. These systems can work. In my current job, after implementing such a system we saw first-year drop outs decrease by about 6%.

1shooner 5y ago

>The software sent me an email asking me to do something, ostensibly from someone in our advising center, signed by my assistant chair instead, but obviously corporate-sounding and autogenerated. It reeked of fakery. So did you do the thing? Did it improve a student outcome? The 'fakery' is just a string that could be updated. Telling you what needs to happen and for whom is the critical function. But then again getting faculty to play ball often may as well be cold fusion...