Educators have an almost supernatural ability to pick up on physical cues when students aren’t engaged. They see a range of behaviors that indicate students’ needs aren’t being met in some way. In person, educators can recognize and apply strategies to support students who are showing signs of disengagement before grades, performance, and progress in the learning journey may drop.
With online and hybrid education growing more embedded in schools, students spend more class-time in digital environments, making it harder for educators to pick up on these cues. However, students need support now more than ever, so identifying students who need intervention is critical for educators.
The new student support spotlight card in the Education Insights app, now in public preview, aims to help the educator “read the room” when some or all of their students are online, and make sense of student engagement signals, so that educators have assistance in guiding their instincts and skills across new teaching mediums.
How does it work?
The student support spotlight card uses machine learning to monitor the digital engagement patterns of entire class as well as each individual student to notify educators when students show potential signs of disengagement.
The student support card provides a list of students who may benefit from an educator follow-up, along with the specific, corresponding indicators that educators can use to structure their check-in conversations. These indicators can serve as talking points to initiate conversations with students and guide their learning progress and wellbeing.
The student support card is based on pedagogical research showing that early intervention when student engagement wanes can help overcome learning obstacles and reduce the risk of individuals falling behind. With early indicators from the student support spotlight card, Education Insights provides a proactive signal to educators who can take action to minimize the negative impact of disengagement.
How to use this card?
We believe that educators know and understand their students best. The student support card is designed to shine a light on student learning and engagement to aid educators in supporting and empowering their students equitably. This tool is meant to be used in combination with personal relationships and understanding of the student’s abilities and circumstances, and this information is only available to student’s class educators.
Built to ensure student privacy and wellbeing
The student support card was built with the utmost consideration for student privacy and wellbeing. The content of the student support card is purely formative and relies only on digital engagement signals that are available already in Education Insights. No additional data is collected. Additionally, the card data is solely available to the class’s educators in Teams, individuals who already have access to the underlying data and have professional familiarity with the student. We carefully designed the student support card, so it does not label a student as a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ class participant or learner. We aim to support the educator in making informed decisions about their students by sharing objective observations of data in a non-judgmental manner.
Enabling the Student Support Spotlight for your tenant
The student support card is only available for educators in the school if the IT admin of the tenant enables “Allow machine learning based Insights”.
To turn machine learning based insights on or off: open the School Data Sync (SDS) Admin Center Go to Settings > Manage Education Insights and turn on Allow machine learning based Insights. Note that the toggle depends on the Collect data for insights toggle, disabling it will automatically disable the student support spotlight experience as well.
Learn more
- Student support card documentation
- Education Insights overview
- IT admin guide for Education Insights
- Guidelines for the ethical use of Education Insights course
- Educators support articles
- Data transparency for students in Education Insights
We’re always looking for ways to make Education Insights better. Have questions, comments, or ideas? Let us know! Add you ideas here or share your comment below.