Colleagues,

Please reach out to students who are showing limited engagement with your course during the first two weeks of the semester. The best person to reach out is you, the instructor, and we encourage you to reach out via email or other means to make sure students understand expectations of the course and don’t immediately fall behind. We know this personal touch is important for our students.

For undergraduates, another means of outreach is submitting an alert in Navigate360, and we have created a new alert that routes directly to our Persistence Action Team, who will then gather additional information on the student (e.g., their progress in other courses) and develop an outreach plan that may include academic advisors, success coaches, or others. In order to submit this alert, log in to the platform at the link above, click Issue an Alert (1), select No or minimal course engagement (2), and provide the student’s name and any other details you may have. Once outreach to the student has been provided, the Persistence Action Team will follow up with you and share details as appropriate.

In addition to not wanting our students to fall behind academically, we’re also not wanting them to fall behind financially. If a student is unable to participate in the course, we want them to consider dropping the course with minimal financial impact. Regardless of when your course occurs during the semester, there are important dates associated with enrollment actions a student might take. For example, if your course is on the regular fall semester schedule, students have until September 15th to drop with no tuition charges for that course and until September 29th to drop and only owe 50% for the course. To help retain all of our students and help them achieve their goals, while also limiting negative impact to our enrollment, we appreciate any outreach you can provide to ensure a student is ready to participate in your course.

More information about Progress Reports and using Navigate to support student success this semester is forthcoming. In the meantime, if you have any questions feel free to email navigate-support@uwm.edu or visit uwm.edu/navigate.

Thanks in advance for participating in these important efforts to promote student success.

Take care,

Johannes

Johannes Britz
Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs