Empowering Tutors, Supporting Learners: How Onefile Engage Transforms FE Colleges

Issue

For learners to complete their further education courses to the best of their ability, it’s vital that they enjoy how and what they are being taught.

Similarly, it’s important that their college tutors engage with the course content and connect well with their students and apprentices.

The biggest threat to successful outcomes is a lack of sustained engagement from learner and tutor, where neither party finds the programme absorbing, motivating, inspiring or interesting.

In post-16 settings such as FE colleges, high student dropout rates are often due to learners feeling isolated, ignored and unsupported. Unable to see the relevance of what they’re learning, they’re more likely to quit the course, leading to fewer completions.

Educate

Everyone learns differently but most of us perform much better when we feel seen, supported and nurtured. Apprentices and T level students on industry placements also need to see, and to understand, how their college coursework relates to the tangible, practical elements of their workplace training.

The role FE College tutors play in getting students and apprentices over the line, cannot be overstated. As well as teaching the course content, teaching staff help keep learners on track, recognising when a student might be struggling and offering timely advice and extra support.

As the leading learner management platform, Onefile produced a Whitepaper, Maximising Apprenticeship Success: The Case for Learner Engagement, which focused on apprenticeship non-completions and what can be done to help learners stay motivated and engaged.

As part of our report, we surveyed 1,000 training providers, including FE colleges to get their views. We asked them if they thought there was room for improvement in the amount of support they were giving learners, and while 57% said no, 43% said yes.

Colleges ‘could do better’

That’s quite a sizable percentage of ‘yes’ replies and clearly indicates that many colleges and their tutors think they could do better.

Fortunately help is readily on hand through Engage, our sophisticated but user-friendly learner engagement software. Powered by AI and offering real-time monitoring, its clever early warning system allows tutors to identify learners’ issues well before they turn into problems.

Solution

Onefile’s Engage flags key indicators such as learners’ session attendance; downloads and the numbers of log-ins. Tutors can then use this data to analyse the levels of student engagement and tailor their support and interventions accordingly.

And as well as being an adaptive platform, Engage also provides colleges with predictive modelling. This gives an accurate insight into how learners are likely to perform on certain tasks, allowing tutors to personalise their learning to suit an individual’s needs.

Engage:

• is pre-loaded with learning from Onefile’s existing dataset of hundreds of thousands of completed and uncompleted apprenticeships to drive the highest levels of engagement.
• learns from your data, every day you use it, so it gets better at knowing what is effective for each apprentice in your environment.
• blends automated interventions with proactive ‘nudges’ to you and your team, based on what the past data says.
• AI-powered insights. Engage uses artificial intelligence to analyse apprenticeship data and predict outcomes. Loaded with 20 years of apprenticeship and learner data, its ability to predict risk is truly a game changer.
• Real-time monitoring. Engage tracks key indicators such as log-in frequency and session attendance, triggering interventions with apprentices who might be at risk of dropping out of the course. This gives training providers a clearer view of how engaged each apprentice is, so they can quickly adjust if someone starts falling behind.
• Proactive Interventions. Engage automatically flags apprentices who might be struggling to catch up so you can step in, sending timely reminders or prompts for action.
• Personalised engagement. We all have our own preferred ways of learning; Engage tailors its support to learners’ individual needs, styles and habits. This personalised approach keeps learners motivated and more likely to be successful.
• Customisable metrics. Engage adapts to fit specific engagement factors, allowing training providers to set and adjust their risk levels and engagement strategies. Our Engage calculator shows how colleges can save money while enhancing the learner experience.
• Seamless integration. Engage works hand-in-hand with Onefile’s Eportfolio and Learning Hub for a cohesive, joined up experience. There’s no need to juggle multiple systems.

Engage has so many cost-saving, intelligent features that could spell the difference between a learner successfully making it to the end of their course or giving up before completion.

Its features include:

No experienced college tutor expects every learner’s learning journey to be plain sailing. A heavy workload, looming assignment deadlines and sometimes unrelated personal issues outside of college and work placement can all cause a learner to stumble. And, as every teacher will tell you, not every learner or apprentice will feel confident enough to reach out when the going gets hard.

Luckily, Engage alerts tutors to any issues before they become insurmountable – enabling the learner and tutor to sit down together and find a workable solution. It lets tutors be more proactive in their approach – ultimately encouraging and supporting students to carry on with and enjoy learning.

To discover more about engage and try the Engage Calculator for yourself, book a discovery call.