Personalised communication is a great way of creating a relationship with students and generating commitment. Knowing that instructors are reviewing each student’s work and results changes the relationship the student has with a course or assignment.
Brightspace offers Intelligent Agents to helps Instructors making personalised communication more efficient. However, it is easy to overuse Intelligent Agents, especially when they should not be used or simply will not be effective.
Brightspace offers the possibility of sending emails to either a student or to an Instructor when a predefined action or non-action has taken place.
For example: A student achieves a high score for a quiz or assignment and the instructor would like to invite the student to a high-achiever group. The student would then receive an email when the Instructor’s invitation.
Emails can be sent from the Intelligent Agent to either students or Instructors. Deciding who should receive the email depends on who you want to take action on the message. Some instructors have the messages sent to themselves in order to use Intelligent Agents as a way of monitoring a course.
If you need the student to take action on the basis of the email we recommend sending the email directly to the student.
- Welcome message: When a new student enrolls for a course, he or she receives a message with additional required information for the course.
- Reminder message: When a student has completed 50% of a course, a message can be sent stating the progress and explaining the rest of the course.
- High-score: A student receives a high score for an assignment or quiz. A message can be sent to congratulate the student.
- Low-score: A student receives a low score for a quiz or assignment. A sympathetic message can be sent advising how to take a re-sit or how to get a higher score for the next assignment or quiz.
- Group Enrollment: When using groups in a course for an assignment, an Intelligent Agent can be set up to send to i.e. send extra instruction on what is expected.
- Use Intelligent Agents only when there is no other suitable way of communicating.
- Try and avoid an overload of emails as they will lose their effectiveness quickly
- When naming Intelligent Agents, use a description that clearly states the intent and resulting action
- Use Intelligent Agent only for your own course and avoid using Intelligent Agents for system level actions such as ‘has not logged into Brightspace for X days’.
To learn more about how to set it up and work with Intelligent Agents, go to the following pages: