Blackboard: Retention Center
Introduction
In this guide, you will be instructed on how to access the Retention Center in Blackboard, use the tool to manage student performance and add alerts and notifications so that you can keep up with students who may be struggling.
What and where is the Retention Center?
The Retention Center is a Blackboard Tool designed to help you identify students that may be at-risk in your course and require special attention.
Enter your Blackboard course, and locate the Control Panel in the lower left.
Click on Evaluation.
Select Retention Center.
The list of students who may be falling behind will appear here. In addition, a red dot indicates which alerts apply to each student.
When you click a student, you will see a more in-depth understanding of what’s going on.
Click the “Monitor” button to be alerted if anything gets to a point that is not up to par.
Click the “Notify” button to send a notification out to a student.
Click the “Customize” button to edit retention center rules. This allows you to set certain benchmarks that would be useful for you. For example, if someone has a grade average that is 25% lower than the class average or maybe they haven’t accessed the course in a week.
How to Use it
Once you click on the Retention Center, a list of students who may be falling behind will appear here. In addition, a red dot indicates which alerts apply to each student.
When you click a student, you will see a more in-depth understanding of what’s going on.
Click the Monitor button to be alerted if anything gets to a point that is not up to par.
Click the Notify button to send a notification out to a student.
Click the Customize button to edit retention center rules. This allows you to set certain benchmarks that would be useful for you. For example, if someone has a grade average that is 25% lower than the class average or maybe they haven’t accessed the course in a week.
Performance Dashboard
The Performance Dashboard (Control Panel > Evaluation > Performance Dashboard) displays all types of user activity in your course or organization. All users enrolled in your course are listed, including instructors, students, teaching assistants, graders, observers, and guests. Pertinent information about each user's progress and activity appears.
The Performance Dashboard page displays a summary of course information:
Last Name, First Name, and Username: Displays the users' names and the usernames they use to log in to Blackboard Learn.
Role: Displays users' defined roles within your course. Examples of roles include instructor, student, grader, teaching assistant, guest, and observer. A user can have one role in your course and a different role in another course.
Last Course Access: Displays the date and time when a user last accessed your course.
Days Since Last Course Access: Displays the number of days that have elapsed since the last time a user accessed your course.
Review Status: Displays how many items have been reviewed. For a detailed view, select the number shown. If the review status tool hasn't been enabled for your course, this column doesn't appear.
Adaptive Release: Displayed only if adaptive release is enabled in your course. Select the icon to open a new window that shows a directory tree overview of the entire course relative to a user and the access status.
Discussion Board: Displayed only if the discussion board is enabled in your course. Select a number link to open the Discussion Board page that lists all of the selected user's discussion posts in your course.
Customize Retention Center: Displayed only if the Retention Center tool is enabled in your course. This column shows the number of triggered rules and the number of total rules that may trigger a warning. For example, 2/6 means a user has triggered 2 rules out of 6 total. Select the data in this column to display a page that shows the Retention Center status for the user.
View Grades: Displayed only if the Grade Center is enabled. This column provides direct links to the Full Grade Center.
You can select Print to open the page in a new window in a printer-friendly format. You can sort columns as needed.