Virtual Engagement Profiles

Overview

Having students move at their own pace and determine their own schedule in a virtual school environment provides tremendous opportunities for self-directed learning and independent work habits. However, some students may fall behind if they don’t have strong time management skills, organizational methods, adult support, or are facing other challenges in their day-to-day lives. Several virtual schools have come up with dynamic systems that provide a snapshot of students’ academic progress and where they may need support, and then provide targeted intervention to support each learner.

Approach

Schools can utilize different platforms to build a dashboard or profile of each student (e.g., Zappee), which pulls continuous data about the student’s academic performance, digital engagement, and ongoing coursework, to paint a clear picture of the student’s progress. Schools can pull these reports and share them with students and families on a weekly basis, and accordingly create a plan to further support the student if necessary.

Some components that can be built into these engagement profiles include:

• Scores/grades from curriculum providers

• Work submissions

• Attendance/truancy

• Engagement minutes per week (when students actually interact with platforms beyond just logging in)

• Standardized test scores

• GPA

• Credit accumulation and analysis

By building a holistic understanding of students beyond just content mastery, educators and leaders are able to identify specific supports that each student needs to succeed. Some strategies include:

• Making adjustments to a student’s schedule to better suit their needs

• Offering more synchronous time with a teacher

• Having a student use the homework hotline when they are stuck

• Meeting with a student’s family and drawing up a “student success contract”

• Providing targeted interventions to address academic gaps or misconceptions

“In an asynchronous world, it's really easy for students to fall through the cracks, and in a place that prioritizes engagement wraparound as much as we do, it's really easy for our staff to miss the cues because they're so busy caring about students.” - Rachel Babcock, Co-Director and Co-Founder of Map Academy