Instructor-to-Learner Communication Scopes & User Stories

Instructor-to-learner communication can be roughly broken down into three broad scopes, based on how many learners are involved:

• One-to-one

• One-to-some

• One-to-all

These scopes have differing needs that I’ll include as user stories under each scope. While some user stories will be shared between scopes, I’ll refrain from including them twice as this doc is already going to be extremely long, and simply leave them on the first scope that surfaced that user story. In other words, the user stories under each scope could all be grouped together as the needs for a single tool, and each scope builds upon the previous, with user stories remaining relevant across scopes.

One-to-One

One-to-one communication tools are used for a variety of reasons, including:

• Intervening with at-risk learners in instructor-paced courses to minimise risk of dropout and failure

• Intervening with disruptive or abusive learners

• Answering private questions that are not suitable for public discussions

• Providing additional direct feedback on staff-graded assignments

One-to-one communication tools are sometimes bi-directional, allowing a dialogue between the instructor and learner, but more commonly have simply instructor-to-learner as their only function.

User Stories

• As an instructor, I want to be able to send an in-app message or email to a specific individual.

• As an instructor, I want to be able to send rich text messages via a WYSIWYG editor, and include attachments such as files

• As an instructor, I want to be able to find learners worth messaging via analytics and reporting, and begin the process from within that interface.

• As an instructor, I want to be able to set up automation, to send a message to individual learners when certain conditions are met.

• As an instructor, I want to provide the option for the recipient to reply directly to my message without exposing my email address.

• As an instructor, if I receive a reply from a learner, I want to be notified that the learner has replied.

• As an instructor, I want to be able to prevent the recipient from being able to reply to my message as needed.

• As an instructor, I want to be able to see if my message has been delivered and opened by the recipient, and whether attachments have been downloaded.

• As a learner, I want messages and particularly emails received through the system to appear official and clearly recognisable so that I don’t assume the email is spam or unimportant.

• As a learner, I want to be notified when a member of staff has sent me a message.

One-to-Some

One-to-some communication involves the instructor sending a message to a subset of learners simultaneously, but not all learners. Some examples of this include:

• Messaging all learners who have not submitted an assignment or completed other content with an imminent deadline

• Messaging a group of highly engaged learners to invite them to participate in an extra credit activity or survey

• Messaging a particular learner group that is not engaging with each other in group discussions

• Sending one-to-one messages in bulk, such as providing identical interventions to learners with identical anti-patterns in analytics

One-to-some communications typically appear to learners in the same way as one-to-one communications, and they are usually unaware that the message was sent to others unless the message itself mentions it.

User Stories

• As an instructor, I want to be able to select multiple learners to send the same message to.

• As an instructor, I want to be able to select a predetermined group (and/or multiple groups) of learners to send my message to, such as cohorts

• As an instructor, I want to be able to use analytics to identify a subset of learners, and send a message to those learners, such as grades, activity status, or completion status.

• As an instructor, I want to inject data in my messages in order to personalise my messages to each learner without having to compose individual messages for each learner, for example their name, or assignments that they have currently not submitted that are due soon.

One-to-All

One-to-All messages are simply messages that are sent from the instructor to the entire course, with no exceptions, customisation or refinement, making them fundamentally less complex than other messaging models. These are typically used in instructor-paced courses for things like:

• Announcements (“There will be a special live event on Tuesday…”)

• Scheduling reminders (“Your first assignment is due on Friday…”)

• Engagement boosters (“Check out these discussion highlights…”)

These announcements are typically impersonal and not tailored to any particular learner, conveying information that all learners should be made aware of.

User Stories

• As an instructor, I want to be able to send the same message to all learners in a course.

• As an instructor, I want to be provided with templates and saved messages that can be used as a base for standard messages.

• As an instructor, I want to schedule standard announcements and engagement boosters to be sent to all learners at scheduled points of the course.

• As an instructor, I want the option to include my scheduled reminders and announcements in future runs of the course.

• As an instructor, I want to be able to cross-post announcements to the discussion forum to enable learners to comment on announcements.

• As an instructor, I want to be able to see which learners have and haven’t seen an announcement.

• As a learner, I want to be able to see all previous announcements in case I missed something important.