At-Risk Alerts: Your LMS Emails You First, Before Struggling Students Go Quiet

A student stops logging in during week five. Nothing dramatic happens: no failed quiz, no complaint, just an absence. The At-risk students card on your Dashboard flags them on day seven, exactly as it should. But you teach four courses, week five is marking week, and you do not open that course's Dashboard until day nineteen — by which point the quiet student has missed two quizzes and decided the course is not for them.

Early-warning signals are only early if someone sees them. A card that waits on a page you have to remember to visit is a record of who needed help, not a prompt to help them. This release of EduGears AI inside Moodle, Canvas and other LTI 1.3 platforms closes that gap: a course can now email its teachers the list, on a schedule they choose, so the signal comes to you.

The card only helps when you look

The students who need an early nudge are, almost by definition, the ones who are not making noise. They are not asking questions in class or emailing about a mark. They have gone inactive, slipped behind pace, started scoring low, or had most of their AI tutor questions declined because they are asking about things the course does not yet cover. Each of those is visible in EduGears AI — on the Dashboard card and in the At-Risk Learners report — but only to a teacher who goes looking.

Most teachers do go looking, some of the time. The problem is the gaps between those times, which is exactly where a disengaging student disappears.

A digest, per course, on your schedule

Each course's Course Settings page has an Email alerts control in its At-risk thresholds section, with three choices:

Pick one and select Save thresholds; the alert setting saves with the thresholds. It is opt-in and per course, so a large first-year course can be on Daily, a small seminar on Weekly, and a course you check every morning anyway can stay Off.

Same thresholds, same students

An alert you cannot reconcile with the screen is worse than no alert, so the email does not have its own rules. It lists the students your saved at-risk thresholds flag — the same students the Dashboard's At-risk students card counts and the At-Risk Learners report lists, and the same thresholds the AI Assistant uses when you ask it about at-risk students. Change the thresholds on Course Settings, or use Save as course thresholds on the report, and the next email follows.

What the email says

• Every flagged student, with the signal that flagged them — for example, “Inactive for 12 days” — so you know whether to send an encouraging message or look at a quiz.
• NEW markers on students who have been flagged since the previous email, so a long-running name does not drown out the one who slipped this week.
• No email when nobody is flagged. A quiet inbox means a quiet list; you will not be trained to ignore an email that says “nothing to report”.

The email deliberately has no links into the course. To act on it, open the course and go to Reports → At-Risk Learners, where you can see the full picture for each student and adjust the thresholds.

Who gets it — and how to stop it

The email goes to everyone who has opened the course from the LMS as a teacher and has an email address in their LMS profile — so co-teachers on the course are covered without anyone maintaining a mailing list.

There are two ways to stop it. For everyone on the course, set Email alerts back to Off and save. For one person, the unsubscribe link in the email stops EduGears AI announcement emails to that address, these alerts included.

On the record, and into next term

Switching alerts on or off is recorded like any other change on Course Settings — who made it and what changed — and each alert sent is recorded too. Platform owners see alert history in the Tutor Audit tab of the EduGears AI management portal, so if anyone asks whether a teacher was told about a struggling student, and when, there is an answer.

When you start a new term with “Copy setup from an existing course”, the email alert setting comes along with the thresholds, the AI Tutor settings and the AI marking setting. Student work is never copied.

Set the thresholds first

Because the email follows your thresholds exactly, it is worth a minute on them before you switch alerts on. The four values sit in the same section of Course Settings:

A course that meets once a fortnight might set inactivity to 14 days so a student is not flagged between sessions; a course where precision matters might raise the score threshold. Whatever you choose, the card, the report and the email all agree.

FAQ