Session Recap - Always Something There to Remind Me: Automated Canvas Due Date Reminders

[james_whalley]

Day 2, July 10 at 10:00am

Presenters

James Whalley, Senior Instructional Design Technologist, Cornell University

Marina Tokman, Assistant Director of Learning Technologies, Cornell University

Joshua Armes, Lead Systems Integrator, Wayne State University

Summary

This session delved into the positive effects of assignment due date reminders on student performance. We explored how a Cornell University professor created a bot for automated notifications in a high-enrollment course to improve the student learning experience and how Cornell University and Wayne State University are working together to scale both its functionality and impact across multiple courses.

Details

There are many different causes of last-minute, late, and missing submissions, from technical and personal issues to procrastination and time-management issues, with some studies estimating the rate for problematic academic procrastination among undergraduates to be over 70% [Klossen, 2008]. Assignment reminders can help to improve assignment submission rates [Bernuy et al., 2021] and decrease the amount of last-minute submissions [Nikolayeva et al., 2020].

While there are existing tools for sending students assignment reminders, they have their shortcomings in certain situations. With Announcements, we have messaging going out to all students, which may cause students who have already submitted their work to tune-out on notifications. With the Inbox, we have to manually select the students who will receive the messaging, meaning we will need to look those students up and then will need to manually add them as recipients. With the Message Students Who… feature of the Gradebook, we have the benefit of limiting the audience to those who should be receiving the message, but we must do this manually, creating a barrier to use in courses with many graded activities.

At Cornell University, Senior Lecturer, Anne Bracy, along with her TA, Zhiqin He, developed python code that allows her to send automated reminders to her students of impending due dates. The code runs once a day and only sends reminders a single time per assignment, X number of days before the assignment is due, and only to students who have not yet submitted work. This messaging originally came from Anne, but now sends from a Canvas TA Bot. While the current process works for Anne, she sees room for improvement and understands it would not scale well to other users.

To help get this feature to a greater number of teachers, Cornell University and Wayne State University are collaborating to develop an LTI for Canvas – the NudgeBot. The NudgeBot will add settings to Canvas Assignments to allow users to schedule reminders for any assignments with due dates. Users will also be able to bulk set nudges from an area available from the Options menu on the Assignments page.

Conclusion

The presenters from Cornell and Wayne State are all interested in collaborating with other institutions to find solutions to improve teaching and learning communities. Furthermore, they are looking to make the NudgeBot code available to interested parties once it is ready for piloting.