What our high school audience needs from their LMS - moodle?

Know your audience.  Who is your audience?  One of our services at BOCES is called AccelerateU.  It has been providing on-line high school credit baring courses for about 10 years.

this audience is 9-12 grade public high school

What I have observed over this time is that most of our students need reminders.  Let me say that again,  Our students taking exclusively on-line courses - that does matter - there is not the benefit of the brick and mortar classroom, where the teacher reminds everyone where they are in the class, what is next, what is left, etc.  Most of the students are taking the courses exclusively on line.  No blending.  There is a teacher who is checking in on them and sometimes a coach or mentor to help keep the student moving along.

They need reminders.  They need to know what is due, what is overdue, what is left, where they are... And, that remind type info needs to be pushed to them.  An email is ok - our front end system, does generate emails that report this type of info.  When the student logs into the portal, they do get summary information, reminder info.  pushed to their dashboard.  Ok, nothing new here.  The model of push relevant info to a students *home page is nothing new.  Its just another way to keep little Festis or Schookers informed.  Another way to hold their precious little hands as they navigate the big bad on-line course.

Our service has evolved over many years from a more spartan beginning, lots of course information, activity, expectation .... to more hand holding, coddling and overall lowering of the bar.

This post started because I was greeted with this email when I logged into my gmail today.

My customer has been moving course away from moodle this year, not because moodle is not a robost complete LMS, but because it is not as warm and fuzzy as the others.  I should call this post "the over fertilization of the warm and fuzzy".... The watering down of the requirement.  The assylum is being run by the inmates, who is in charge around here?

That is a digression and a rambling.  Let me bring it back and wrap it up.

High school students, at least ours, need extra hand holding.  They need to be coddled and reminded about what is expected of them.  They, or their mothers, will try to play the victem card if the going gets tough.   Our service has changed over time to reflect this reality.  It feels like we spend more time creating exceptions, allowing this, finding things, extending things, explaining things than we do actually doing things.   Our LMS's have had to support this by creating summary information about what is due next, what has not been done, how to get help, how to not fall behind, what they will have to do, how much time they will have to spend.....and pushing it to the students.  Pushing in email, to home pages.... this is a home page

A visual representation of the hand holding....

To summarize - this is the information that is pushed to the student

-  messages, academic snapshot, suggested pacing, coach info.

Its all this stuff to help them not fail - rather than to challenge them....... I guess that is simply my beef - when did we arrive at this state?  When did we go from challenge the student to coddle the student?  that should be another post.