Thursday, August 13, 2009

Students at Risk - Response to SMS

I sent 8 SMS messages to the students who had missed the first two tutorials and had not given me any reasons for their non-attendance.  I received 4 responses within 2 hours of sending the message.  I consider this to be an exceptionally high response rate for students that I had considered were disengaged totally.  I will continue to use SMS for this purpose and will recommend that other staff do the same.

The only downside of this approach was the tedium of sending 8 SMS from my personal phone at my personal cost.  I have called the ICT service desk to see if there is a method by which I can send bulk SMS messages to students simply using University resources - I am awaiting their reply.

No comments: