Another crucial part of the system is the provision of automatic feedback to the students through email messages. Essentially, this involves the student being informed of all the `irregularities' in their laboratory data: absences, lack of needed extensions, missed extensions, excused missed extensions (together with expiry date if appropriate), and so on. One of the most effective pieces of feedback is the inclusion of failure predictions for those students whose predicted mark is less than the pass level in some module. The feedback can also complain about the failure of the student to archive their work (e.g. for plagiarism detection) where appropriate.
The purpose of these messages is two-fold: to check that the student agrees with the data (it may be that the student has tried to give an excuse but it has not been recorded properly, for example), and/or to give the student the necessary prod to get their act together! The email messages can be copied to the student's personal tutor to enable him or her to be made aware of the students difficulties.
An example message can be found in figure 2.
In the early days of ARCADE, these email messages were sent approximately once per week, to all students who had any irregularities. It was noticed that some students began to ignore the messages by deleting them without even reading them. So, the strategy was changed to a process which ran every day, emailing only those students whose list of irregularities was different from the day before. This was an improvement, but lead to some students getting emails several times a week! The current approach is to run the same process, but only once per week rather than daily. This seems to work the best of the approaches tried. (See Future enhancements, below.)
A related feature, which was added after a couple of years, is the provision to laboratory staff of a printed copy of the irregularities pertaining to the students in a particular laboratory group. This appears next to the data sheet for the current laboratory session, so that the staff can easily see what problems each student is having in their laboratory while taking attendance. This enables timely intervention and help by staff when students are struggling, or the correction of laboratory data errors at source, whichever is appropriate. It is clear that those laboratories in which the staff use this information run more smoothly than those where the staff ignore it.
