Higher education can offer a great deal of flexibility to students in the delivery of their learning. This flexibility can create challenges to the effective identification and intervention of students that may require support during their learning journey. It’s important that any solution that supports students and their wellbeing is holistic. Therefore, to have ability to pull together not only attendance data for a wide range of scheduled and unscheduled activities, but to gather important additional engagement data such as library, virtual learning and ongoing work submissions.

Students are at the heart of the process

We place the individual student at the heart of the engagement process. Presto’s flexible model allows us to effectively monitor attendance and engagement to a granular level. Below is a diagram representing how Presto can ensure that all of the critical points of contact with the institution can be incorporated to provide a comprehensive and individual student engagement picture.

PrestoFlow – Smart engagement support

PrestoFlow is designed to actively support the learner experience through the use of workflows deployed to mirror your institutions intervention and support policies. You can define as many workflows as required and they can reflect a wide range of factors when deciding whether a learner’s engagement or lack of is causing a need for concern and might require intervention at some level.

In our experience attendance cannot be taken as an absolute measure of engagement by a learner. An example might be a learner that attends some lectures and a number of seminars, but whose attendance pattern is not achieving the base attendance threshold set by the university, department or school etc. Clearly this may be a concern, but what if they are spending a greater amount of time in the library or catching up on lectures and activities in the VLE? If they are completing and submitting their workload on time and achieving good grades, are they in fact a ‘student at risk’? Perhaps they are best suited to an alternative study mode that could be addressed by their tutor, with some consultation.

PrestoFlow can not only consider the threshold for attendance by a defined level based on the student’s study/subject type, but it can also include any other areas of engagement that may be falling below your pre-determined levels.