Engaging Your Students with Oxford Insight

We know that professors today must compete with a myriad of distractions. It can be difficult to maintain your students’ interest and keep them focused and thinking deeply about the topic at hand. Oxford Insight is here to help. Using the available tools and resources built into the program, your students will be on track in no time. Here are the top tips from fellow users to help re-engage your students with Oxford Insight:

  1. Pick and Choose the Right Assignments for the New Student Dashboard

    2. Your student’s dashboard functions as their landing page and home base for your course. Being able to see upcoming assignments on the calendar as well as an immediate overview of their performance in the class is an easy, invaluable way to keep them focused on the work they need to do.

    Use the Activity Settings to determine which assignments will be graded and available for them to see on their calendars.

  2. Use Discussion Boards and Make Them Work for You

    3. Many OI courses come ready to go with discussion boards embedded into the text as a post-reading activity. If there is not one there already, you can customize the chapter content and add one in. You can also easily customize already existing boards to change the topic of discussion or further personalize for your classroom’s needs.

    A discussion board is a great way to drive students to sit and reflect on the course material and also engage with their fellow students’ ideas. Requiring a discussion board post as well as a response to another student’s post can ensure that students are not just doing the work, but critically thinking about it too.

    For more information on adding discussion boards to your text, visit the Oxford Insight Knowledge Base.

  3. Adjust Late Work Settings and Personalize Test Taking Conditions for Individual Students

    4. Use the Late Work Manager (located under Instructor Tools) to set an overarching late work policy or accept or reject late work on a manual case-by-case basis. The customizable late work policy can be set to accept late work while automatically deducting your choice of points by the hour, day, or week.

    To set accommodations for individual students, use the Enrollments page also located under Instructor Tools. Select the student you wish to accommodate and under Actions, click “Accommodations.” Here, you can set extensions, additional submission numbers, and a time limit increase factor that will apply to all activities in the course for this student.

    You can also adjust the settings for individual activities for particular students through the Gradebook. To do so, hover over the assignment block in the Gradebook you wish to adjust and select the three dots that appear on the right (note: you must be grouped by Activity in order to do this). You can adjust the grade manually, or select Manage Overrides to set accommodations for the student for this one assignment.

    Oxford Insight offers these settings so that accommodating for students’ needs is a simple, straightforward process. When students have the opportunity to do their coursework in personalized conditions that also work for you, they will be set up for success and be more engaged than ever before.

  4. Use Three New Student Reports to Make Course Adjustments and Learn Where Your Students Need to Improve

    5. Access three new reports using the Reports dropdown on the lefthand menu. You’ll find the following three options to help you gain even more insight into how your students are performing:

        • Student Deep Dive report
          • The student deep dive report allows you to focus in on any particular student enrolled in your class. Clicking on this report will lead to a list of all students from which you can select one, but you can also access this report via the gradebook. This report will show you how a student has performed across all assignments and chapters, their times of submission in terms of due date, and includes direct links to further details of all submitted work.
        • Assessment Deep Dive report
          • The assessment deep dive displays an overview of how all students in a course are performing on assignments. This can be very useful to see overarching trends and which concepts the class as a whole may find more difficult. Using this report, you can tweak your course through the semester (or in preparation for the next one) to better emphasize key concepts or edit the assigned quizzes to better fit your students.
        • Course Performance report
          • This report is also shown on the instructor dashboard so you can have an immediate view of how your class is performing. This includes a grade distribution chart as well as one broken down by chapter and a student engagement graph showing a clear view into how much your students are engaging with OI and the content of the course.

  5. Promote the Study Center to Help Students Improve on Unmastered Concepts

    6. When students enter the Study Center, they can immediately see which concepts Oxford Insight has flagged that they need extra practice on, and in which ones they are already proficient. They can then proceed to review and work on the flagged concepts until proficiency is reached. Pointing students toward this resource is a great way to allow them to take control of their own education and get the extra help or study time they may need to succeed on future assessments.



Learn More

The OUP Customer Success Team has created step-by-step guides, click-through slides, videos, and more to help you make the most of your Oxford Insight experience. All of these resources are available in the Oxford Insight Knowledge Base.

We also host webinars to help instructors get more familiar with Oxford Insight. Learn more and sign up today!