Changes to student LEO notifications

Students have recently reported receiving a burdensome number of ACU emails and communicated that LEO notification emails are a significant contributor to this problem. To help alleviate this, we’re making a change.

Each LEO notification (including forums and announcements within LEO units) triggers an email to students. Students have reported receiving more than 50 emails per week as a regular occurrence, often resulting in them feeling overwhelmed. This feedback was further supported by the recent Commencing Student Survey (CCS) 2021 report.

To help reduce students’ email load, the Learning and Teaching Centre (LTC) is going to adjust students’ LEO default setting to ‘Digest’. This means all announcements sent through LEO will be collated daily and forwarded in one email.

These default setting will be created for all commencing students, and the settings for all existing students will be amended at the commencement of Semester 1, 2022.

LTC will work with MER and AskACU to ensure all students, commencing and existing, are aware of this change and given resources to help them amend their settings if they wish.

This work aligns with the Student Content and Communications Project driven by MER, which aims to improve the quality and consistency of information ACU shares with current students.

What academics can do

You can help our students reduce their LEO notifications by taking the following steps:

• Master the Announcements forum in multi-campus units
  Announcement forums in all units are set to ‘forced subscription’, which means that students don’t have the option not to receive these communications. So in multi-campus units, it’s important you use the inbuilt LEO group functions correctly to make sure that your announcements target only the intended student group/s. If you don’t check these settings, any announcement will be broadcast to all participants. Watch this video to see how to send an announcement that is viewable only by students on a specific campus.
• Help students manage their own notification settings
  Many students don’t realise that they can control how they receive notifications from LEO forums. For example, they don’t know they have the option to receive a separate email per post or a single daily ‘digest’ email summarising all posts. Teaching staff can help by highlighting this option to them and directing them to this LEO Guide to make any desired adjustments.
• Manage the options
  ‘Optional subscription’ is the default setting for all other forums. This means students need to decide which forums they want to be subscribed to. Part of your welcome or introduction to a unit could include showing your students how and where they can activate forum subscriptions.

If you would like any further advice on LEO notifications, please contact LTC at LTC@acu.edu.au.