Using reflective self-assessments in a learning management system to promote student engagement and academic success

Learning management systems have the capabilities of creating, fostering, delivering, and facilitating learning at anytime and anywhere, allowing students to engage in online discussion and collaborative activities. However, many researchers feel that the online space essentially remains a repository for content. However, the fact that some academics use such systems as a content dumping site cannot be generalized. No, such a blanket statement would be a grave injustice to those few academics that are trying to improve the teaching and learning process, especially through reflective practice. The purpose of this paper is to highlight how an academic in electrical engineering has effectively used Blackboard (TM) to promote student engagement and academic success through online reflective self-assessments. An ex-post facto study is used with descriptive statistics of the quantitative data. Two groups of students enrolled for different electronic communication modules were asked to complete biweekly online reflective self-assessments via Blackboard (TM). Results indicate that those who completed more than 50% of these self-assessments were almost twice as likely to achieve academic success as compared to those who completed less than 50% of them. These results tend to suggest that some academics are using educational technology more effectively than other academics, to the benefit of students and higher educational institutions.