Last Date of Participation

Last Date of Participation

What is a Last Date of Participation used for?

Instructors at U-M are required to provide a student’s Last Date of Participation in instances where a student has partially completed course material but not finished a course. 

This is used by the University, typically the Registrar’s office, to understand if a student can withdraw from a class even after the add/drop deadline without incurring costs for the credit or if they could be eligible for an Incomplete (per UMSI’s policies regarding Incompletes). This can have additional implications for returning federal financial aid.

University Guidance

The university provides a general definition for ‘participation’ in a course. You can find this information by visiting the Enter Grades documentation or Change Grades documentation, but a copy of the instructions for recording partial participation has been provided here:

Partial – student attended at least 1 class or completed at least 1 assignment, including:

• Written and/or verbal conversation between the instructor and student about the course.

• Participation in a discussion in Canvas.

• Completion of a paper or examination

Note: Participation for these purposes is defined not by the quantity or quality of participation, but by the student's last participation. (i.e., A student could never attend class, but if they take the final exam, the Level of Participation is Fully Participated.)

UMSI Guidance

The university’s definition for what counts as participation is fairly light. Instructors can typically think of participation as active engagement with the course in some way that others (instructors or fellow students) may engage with or respond to, or the student actively ‘showing up’ to the course.

Residential, Hybrid, and Online courses often have a lot of overlap in what counts as participation, though there may be some unique methods depending on the mode of instruction. Below are some additional examples of what could count as participation and some recommendations for what to avoid, as different platforms or third-party tools that are used (Canvas, Slack, etc) may use similar terms to mean different things.

Additional Methods for Participation to Consider

“Attending Class” for remote, online courses:

• Attending an Office Hour or other synchronous event

“Written and/or verbal conversation” for courses with Slack channels or workspaces:

• Sending a message about the course or its materials in a Slack channel, even if other students respond to it

• Note that the lead instructor for a class is typically who would report the Last Date of Participation. If you have additional instructors supporting your course, be sure to ask if they have had individual contact with the student about the course to have the most accurate Last Date of Participation.

“Completion of a paper or examination” for all courses:

• Assignments submitted, including those that haven’t yet been graded or have been autograded.

Caution: Do Not Use for Participation

Canvas can generate an “Access Report” for a student, which indicates “Participation” for some items. 

• It is not recommended using this to indicate a student’s Last Date of Participation, as some participation that may be common in a course (such as assignments with LTI links) are not counted as participation, and some information may be easily conflated (such as “participation” being tied to when someone  “last viewed” material). 

• Instead, it is recommended that instructors look at other indicators of participation for the Last Date of Participation, such as assignment submissions, Canvas discussion posts, or even DMs with instructors within Canvas.

Canvas also offers a “Course Analytics” tool that can generate insights into how students are accessing your Canvas site, including “page views” and “participation”.

• Course Analytics, again, is a great way to understand your canvas site interactions at a high level, but should not be used for more precise data that would be needed for things like Last Date of Participation. 

• As mentioned in the documentation of Course Analytics and their page view data specifically (emphasis added): 

  • “A "page view" is when you open a page in a course. Page views can indicate how a user has been accessing course resources. However, because page view data is based on requests to the server, use page view data only as a good approximation to activity and not an absolute metric.”

If your course uses Slack, it would not be recommended to use a message that was sent into a channel or workspace that was not about the course or does not seem to be intentionally sent. Sometimes students accidentally post to the wrong channel or workspace without realizing it.