St Mary's Personal Tutoring Policy is designed to support students' academic, personal and professional development through an on-going personalised point of contact with the University. Personal Tutoring has an important role in enabling students to fully engage with their University experience and realise their full potential, both educationally and personally throughout their time at the University.
A Personal Tutoring Dashboard (PTD) was previously developed alongside the policy to provide Personal Tutors with key information about their Tutees and offers a basic platform for Personal Tutors to record (but not share) their interactions with their Tutees. However, it was extremely limited both in the types of data that are made available and the functionality and so it did not enable Personal Tutors to maximise the effectiveness of their engagement with Tutees.
Therefore, the aim of this project was to implement a new Personal Tutor Dashboard which enables Personal Tutors to monitor a Tutee’s engagement and academic progress throughout their studies. The data included allows the Personal Tutor to gain an insight into both the Tutee’s academic progress and more personal factors that may affect their study, for example whether they are a Home, EU or overseas student, and the distance they live from campus. Personal Tutors can use the dashboard to monitor their Tutees engagement and their progress regularly to ensure that they can provide individualised support for each of their Tutees.
Having looked at the various options available the project concluded that the best solution to meet our needs was to procure a product called SEAtS Student Success by a company called SEAtS Software.
The new Personal Tutor Dashboard was implemented in October 2019.
The dashboard brings together existing information about students’ engagement from St Mary’s systems [i.e. Attendance, Moodle usage & Library usage (Book Loans & E-resources)] into a single view. Data is uploaded to the dashboard nightly (except Library eResources which is monthly). The dashboard is cloud-based service and, therefore, is accessible anywhere via a web browser.
In addition, each student is also able to view their own data within the dashboard including: a calendar of their historic interactions with the University; their attendance records for each of their modules; and their address and contact details.
