Bälter Olle, Jemstedt Andreas, Javan Abraham Feben, Persson Osowski Christine, Mugisha Reuben, Bälter Katarina
Division of Media Technology and Interaction Design, Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan - Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
Department of Public Health Sciences, Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden.
JMIR Form Res. 2023 Oct 13;7:e43977. doi: 10.2196/43977.
Postsecondary students need to be able to handle self-regulated learning and manage schedules set by instructors. This is particularly the case with online courses, as they often come with a limited number of social reminders and less information directly from the teacher compared to courses with physical presence. This may increase procrastination and reduce timeliness of the students. Reminders may be a tool to improve the timeliness of students' study behavior, but previous research shows that the effect of reminders differs between types of reminders, whether the reminder is personalized or general, and depending on the background of the students. In the worst cases, reminders can even increase procrastination.
The aim of this study was to test if personalized email reminders, as compared to general email reminders, affect the time to completion of scheduled online coursework. The personalized reminders included information on which page in the online material the participants ought to be on at the present point in time and the last page they were on during their last session. The general reminders only contained the first part of this information: where they ought to be at the present point in time.
Weekly email reminders were sent to all participants enrolled in an online program, which included 39 professional learners from three East African countries. All participants in the Online Education for Leaders in Nutrition and Sustainability program, which uses a question-based learning methodology, were randomly assigned to either personalized or general reminders. The structure of the study was AB-BA, so that group A received personalized reminders for the first unit, then general reminders for the rest of the course, while group B started with general reminders and received personalized reminders only in the third (and last) unit in the course.
In total, 585 email reminders were distributed, of which 390 were general reminders and 195 were personalized. A Bayesian mixed-effects logistic regression was used to estimate the difference in the probability of being on time with one's studies. The probability of being on time was 14 percentage points (95% credible interval 3%-25%) higher following personalized reminders compared to that following general reminders. For a course with 100 participants, this means 14 more students would be on time.
Personalized reminders had a greater positive effect than general reminders for a group of adults working full-time while enrolled in our online educational program. Considering how small the intervention was-adding a few words with the page number the student ought to be on to a reminder-we consider this effect fairly substantial. This intervention could be repeated manually by anyone and in large courses with some basic programming.
高等院校学生需要具备自主学习能力，并能按照教师设定的时间表进行学习。在线课程尤其如此，因为与面授课程相比，在线课程通常提供的社交提醒较少，直接来自教师的信息也较少。这可能会增加学生的拖延行为，降低其及时性。提醒可能是提高学生学习行为及时性的一种工具，但先前的研究表明，不同类型的提醒效果不同，无论是个性化提醒还是一般性提醒，且取决于学生的背景。在最糟糕的情况下，提醒甚至会增加拖延行为。
本研究旨在测试与一般性电子邮件提醒相比，个性化电子邮件提醒是否会影响在线课程作业的完成时间。个性化提醒包括参与者目前应该在在线材料的哪一页以及他们上一次学习时所在的最后一页的信息。一般性提醒只包含该信息的第一部分：他们目前应该在的位置。
每周向参加一个在线项目的所有参与者发送电子邮件提醒，该项目有来自东非三个国家的39名专业学习者。营养与可持续发展领导者在线教育项目采用基于问题的学习方法，所有参与者被随机分配到个性化提醒组或一般性提醒组。研究结构为AB - BA，即A组在第一单元收到个性化提醒，然后在课程的其余部分收到一般性提醒，而B组从一般性提醒开始，仅在课程的第三个（也是最后一个）单元收到个性化提醒。
总共发送了585封电子邮件提醒，其中390封是一般性提醒，195封是个性化提醒。使用贝叶斯混合效应逻辑回归来估计按时完成学业的概率差异。与一般性提醒相比，个性化提醒后按时完成学业的概率高出14个百分点（95%可信区间为3% - 25%）。对于一个有100名参与者的课程来说，这意味着会有14名更多的学生按时完成学业。
对于参加我们在线教育项目的一群全职工作的成年人来说，个性化提醒比一般性提醒产生的积极影响更大。考虑到干预措施非常小——只是在提醒中添加学生应该在的页码的几个字——我们认为这种效果相当显著。任何人都可以手动重复这种干预，在大型课程中通过一些基本编程也可以实现。
