Research Minute is a faculty spotlight series featuring educators and researchers participating in the D2L Educators-in-Residence program. Each conversation explores a teaching and learning challenge, the research it inspired and a practical insight educators can apply in their own work.
Meet the Researcher
Stephanie De Souza, PhD is a microbiologist by training and spent years working in microbiology research before becoming a lecturer. Since fall 2024, she has been teaching Microbiology (Lecture and Lab) at the University at Albany, SUNY, where she serves as a Lecturer in the Department of Biology. Teaching large classes turned her into a passionate education researcher, and this project was her first step into that world.
Research Focus
In this Research Minute, Stephanie De Souza looks at how personalized, automated messages can help students feel more supported and connected in large classes. Even though students knew the messages were automated, they still said they felt seen, encouraged and supported by their instructor. Using D2L Brightspace Intelligent Agents, De Souza also explored how this connection compared with students’ ongoing feelings of anonymity in a course with hundreds of peers.
1. What teaching and learning question or problem inspired this research?
I teach Microbiology to over 200 students in a big lecture hall. It is very well established through research in the field that large lectures make students feel anonymous and disconnected, which has practical implications for their learning process and success in class. Furthermore, I could see this in my own classroom; even with a course designed to be interactive, students felt I wouldn’t notice their absence. At the same time, as an instructor, I simply cannot send frequent, personal feedback to every student, even though we know that kind of contact is what builds confidence and belonging. That gap between what students need and what one instructor can physically do is what inspired this project.
2. What did you hope to better understand?
Most research on automated messaging asks whether these messages change student behavior or grades. My question came before that. Most students in large classes have never experienced this level of close feedback, so I was intrigued by how they would sense it. Would receiving frequent, personalized messages in a 200-plus-person course feel supportive, or strange, or make no difference at all? I wanted to understand the experience of receiving these messages. Do students feel more supported and connected when they arrive at the right moments? And which types of messages, reminders, kudos or alerts, do they actually find helpful?
3. What is one important thing you learned—or that surprised you?
The biggest surprise came right after the first messages went out: my inbox filled with replies. Students wrote back to say thank you or to tell me their plan for improving, even though they knew the messages were automated. The survey results then showed this was not just a few students. The central finding of the study was a sense of personal connection: students reported feeling seen, encouraged, and looked after by the instructor, and receiving the messages felt like personal contact from the course, even knowing they were automated. But the most interesting result came with a nuance. The same students remained divided on whether they still felt anonymous in the course. The sense of belonging has more than one dimension, and the messages strengthened the connection between students and their instructor without resolving the social anonymity of sitting among hundreds of peers.
4. How did Brightspace support the teaching practice or research you explored?
The entire intervention used Intelligent Agents, a native Brightspace feature. I wrote 20 messages following good feedback practices and set release conditions based on each student’s behavior in the course, such as exam performance, participation, or use of the course flexibility policies. During the semester, the agents sent 1,442 individualized emails to 214 students, something I would never be able to do by myself. The setup took about one week of work. After that, the right message reached the right student at the right moment without any additional effort from me.
5. Finish this sentence: “One thing I hope other educators take from this research is…”
…that making a large class feel personal is within reach of any instructor. I did not use any additional tool or budget, only a feature of the LMS my institution already had. Setting it all up can seem like a lot of work at first, and honestly a bit daunting, but the rewards are fantastic. My advice is to write the messages in your own voice and to prioritize the ones that recognize students’ effort, because those were the ones my students valued the most.
Key Takeaway and Learn More
It is possible to make a large class feel cozy, and less daunting and lonely for our students. With messages written in the instructor’s own voice and a tool the LMS already offers, even a lecture hall with hundreds of students can become a place where each student feels that someone is paying attention to their work. The full study is on its way to publication, so stay tuned to D2L’s Teaching and Learning Studio for the paper. And if you want to start navigating this world of automated, inclusive feedback in your own course, I would love to hear from you at [email protected].
