Students who never answer

[Hegemony]

Our place urges us to make contact with students who start missing class, to try to find out what's wrong and if they need more support. They have especially urged us to do this in the present conditions, when we're all online. So I faithfully try to do this, writing friendly emails asking how they are and saying they're missed and asking if there's any way I can help. But I never, never ever ever get a response.

This term, I asked everyone at the beginning of our online stint to fill out a little sheet about whether their home situation was fine or whether there might be internet problems, distractions, or other challenges, including just finding the whole situation distracting or stressful. About half the students said they had challenges of various natures.

But now six of the students (out of 40) have gone silent. I checked all of their sheets and they are all students who said their home situations were fine (e.g. "I live along so there won't be any distractions from roommates, no internet problem").

So I have emailed these students as advised, and still no response. I think they may think I'm like some kind of teacher-bot, instead of a real person who's really concerned.

Have any of you managed to get an answer from missing students?  How did you word your email so as to encourage a response?

[sockknitter]

Do you have any type of student support office that you could reach out to? Ours is still functioning remotely and has managed to make contact with my missing students, I believe via phone numbers on record with the university. It was far more effective than any of my emails, at least temporarily.

My university is allowing students to choose the pass/fail option after final grades are posted. I suspect some of my students are planning to consider that option because of the challenges they are currently experiencing that are affecting their academic work.

[spork]

Your question assumes that students actually read emails sent to their university email account, which is often not be the case. Frequently I am only emailed by students when they have questions complain about their grades.

If by "gone silent" you mean the students are no longer submitting assignments and haven't been logging into the LMS, I would just contact Student Affairs or its equivalent with "I never received a response to this email from Zachary Biffington and he has not turned in any assignments since Date X." Then it's not your problem anymore, and it preempts end of the semester situations similar to this:

http://activelearningps.com/2020/03/02/when-students-ignore-feedback/.

[polly_mer]

Is calling or texting an option?  I second the recommendation to get additional offices into the loop as well as possibly expanding contact options.

Students may have had good enough situations at the beginning and now don't.  For example, in the past week here, we have had two widespread internet outages to the point that I personally had multiple employer-related online meetings rescheduled once the internet was back up.  Per an email from Blocky's elementary teacher, only half the parents last week responded to the weekly check-ins she sent.

In addition, what Spork wrote regarding students not checking their campus emails rang true with most of my experiences as a classroom teacher.  I remember one spectacular-for-its-recurring-annoyances term that included students not discovering they had signed up for a hybrid course until we met in person during the second week of the term. 

How could this have happened?  Students didn't see the marking in the catalog (and yes it was a paper course catalog well after the year 2000), didn't check their emails at all during the three weeks I sent welcome-to-the-class-here's-your-first-assignments-before-we-meet-in-person emails, and then didn't ask any questions about not having meetings both Tuesday and Thursday since it was common enough to have once-per-week evening classes.

Even at Super Dinky, the registrar's office resorted to texting/calling individual students because emails were completely ignored by the students who most needed the reminders of approaching deadlines.

[downer]

Back when I was invested in that sort of thing, I would ask students to supply their cell # at the start of the semester so I could contact them. I'm sure that many students are struggling now in various ways and may occasionally check their email. It's certainly possible that messages of concern and offering support would help.

These days, I take the view that it is up to students to motivate themselves, and I will rarely reach out unless I know something about a student's life and problems and feel a desire to help them out.

It most of my online classes, 10-20% of students disappear or withdraw.

[Caracal]

Our place urges us to make contact with students who start missing class, to try to find out what's wrong and if they need more support. They have especially urged us to do this in the present conditions, when we're all online. So I faithfully try to do this, writing friendly emails asking how they are and saying they're missed and asking if there's any way I can help. But I never, never ever ever get a response.

This term, I asked everyone at the beginning of our online stint to fill out a little sheet about whether their home situation was fine or whether there might be internet problems, distractions, or other challenges, including just finding the whole situation distracting or stressful. About half the students said they had challenges of various natures.

But now six of the students (out of 40) have gone silent. I checked all of their sheets and they are all students who said their home situations were fine (e.g. "I live along so there won't be any distractions from roommates, no internet problem").

So I have emailed these students as advised, and still no response. I think they may think I'm like some kind of teacher-bot, instead of a real person who's really concerned.

Have any of you managed to get an answer from missing students?  How did you word your email so as to encourage a response?

A lot of this depends on where you are. I usually teach somewhere between 100-200 students at a big regional school with lots of commuters. I fill out he early warning and midterm grade forms, but I don't try to contact student who go missing. I figure the students know they are not doing the work and must have their reasons. I really only contact students when their disappearance comes out of the blue. The normal pattern is for a student to not participate, come to class irregularly, miss lots of reading quizzes and then eventually fade away entirely. Every once in a while I have a student who has been engaged and responsible but just doesn't turn in a final paper or show up for the final exam. In those cases, I get  worried that something sudden and unexpected happened and I'm worried that a student who might be a good candidate for an incomplete is too overwhelmed to contact me.

[jerseyjay]

It is not clear from the post whether these students have totally disappeared from the class or if they have just not responded to email.

As a general rule, a high percentage of students never check email, never respond to email, or whatever, but they are still doing the work. To be fair, many of my colleagues don't respond to email either. And, to be honest, I often do not respond to email that looks like junk mail or form letters.

If the students have just gone to ground, that could be due to lots of things. In my online classes, a good 10-30 percent just go away in normal  circumstances. Now of course, there are other issues that might weigh on students. (And keep in mind that if a student lived alone with a good internet connection in January, that may no longer be the case.)

What you should do depends on several factors. Is this a large introductory course? Or is it a small upper-level course. For my large courses, I sent emails to all the students, and filled out the forms from academic advising about students who had gone missing. For my smaller classes for majors, made up students I had often known for several years, I called them and tried to get in touch with more effort. Many, in fact, had serious challenges (one had Covid-19; one's father was in hospital with Covid; one was unemployed; one had several deaths in the family because of Covid).

Of course it is possible the students in my lower level classes have similar problems. For those who do, and who contacted me, I have been very lenient. But if they have not reached out to me, I am not able to spend the time to track down 50-100 students beyond the efforts I have already made.

[RatGuy]

When OP sent out their survey, presumably they informed students that email would be a primary method of communication. After all, students are no longer coming to class.

I would take a cue from the department chair. My chair has asked us to remain flexible and to continue to email non-communicative and non-participatory students. I have a hunch that some of them -- even those who answered "yes" to all the survey questions -- will be given incompletes based on the circumstances. The university has already allowed students to opt-out of final exams as well as opt-in to P/F. That means a large number of my students already see themselves as finished with this term.

[backatit]

And yet still some will fall through the cracks. I did all of the above (including contacting student services about the ones I hadn't heard from) and STILL got the end of the semester e-mail from one who was failing about how COVID was impacting them, and how they were working on the front lines, facing all these hardships, didn't have sufficient PPE, suspected they were infected, yada yada yada. I felt bad till I went back and looked at their missing assignments, the first of which was in January. They haven't turned anything in all semester. Now they want to submit an entire semester's work today. So sometimes no matter what you do, they will still fight you to help them :/.

[Ruralguy]

I would say , keep offering help, keep other offices in touch, then hold them accountable.
If they wish to get an incomplete, protest the grade, etc. then, hey, what-do-you-know, they start discovering how phones and email work!

[FishProf]

Two things:

1) We have students who had a Field course cancelled, and were offered 1) A full withdrawal and refund; or 2) An online way to complete if they needed it to graduate this semester.   1/3 of the those who took option 2 are radio silent.

2) I treat all assignments as either BC19 or AC19.  After gets a flexible deadline approach, before are just zeros.

[Hegemony]

It is an upper-level course that fulfills a number of requirements but primarily appeals to students with genuine interest in the subject (the Bible).

The students have gone completely silent — have stopped turning in assignments and appearing on the LMS.

Our university is especially urging us to contact students because we're losing so many students, though going online, that a budget crisis is already cutting jobs.

Furthermore, at least one of my missing students is due to graduate this spring, and will fail to do so if they fail this course, which they will do (even with Pass/Fail) if they don't start participating.

I guess there's nothing more to do, then. In a previous year, a student went missing, I sent out an email of encouragement, never heard back. The student returned to class a few weeks later.  I actually asked her point-blank (in private) why she had never responded to my email. She just stared at me and didn't answer me then either. It's bizarre to me.

[downer]

My take is that a student who is due to graduate and won't read their email probably should not have a college degree. But there are financial pressures to get them through.

[Hegemony]

Well, miracle of miracles, I got my first reply. The student said "I was very busy with family care last week so I couldn't do any classwork. But thanks for checking up on me, that means a lot to me." The student had indicated before that he was living alone, so something has clearly changed. Or he is lying. But my guess is that he had to go take care of family members. I feel someone what better. It's a strange feeling sending these emails out into the ether and having them be completely ignored; it feels as if I've gone invisible or something.

[the_geneticist]

Can you reach out to their Academic Advisors?  If they are still enrolled, I would think they are having troubles in all of their classes and not just yours.

Also, students don't disappear from our LMS after week 2.  So, it's possible they dropped the class, but are still on the online system