Beyond E-Mail Nudges

The Nudge application can deliver the treatment to the students in four different ways: the instructor can send the nudge via e-mail without the assignment, share the assignment as a Google document, attach the assignment as a PDF or save the nudge to a column within the gradebook spreadsheet. If you are using nudge with a large class, please read this section. Each of the aforementioned methods have different computational limits that may come into play when sending the nudge to a large number of students.

Shared Google Docs and PDFs

The most feature-rich delivery option is to share the Google document with the student. This option grants the student read/write access to a copy of the assignment while the instructor maintains ownership. Prior to the due date, the student can work on the assignment directly in the Drive environment. Because the instructor maintains ownership of the document, if the student asks for help, the instructor can comment directly in the document. Once the due date is reached, the instructor can grade the assignments directly within Drive. As shown by the figure below, each student file is placed within a single folder to ease the organization of files for the instructor. This feature should not be used on campuses that do not have Google Drive accounts for their students (such as the University of Nebraska).

Files created by the nudge software. Nudge creates a folder taking the name of the assignment and creates an individual file for each student.

Saving the Message to a Column

The most flexible option is to save the message to a column. With this option, the user can save the message in a column in the gradebook. This will allow the user to include the message in any format they wish. Most often, this option is selected so that the instructor can use a mail merge for paper, SMS, or other delivery. Microsoft has provided instructions on how to use Word and Excel to perform a mail merge. When this option is selected, the gradebook will be saved as a spreadsheet in the user's Google Drive account (normally an LMS gradbook file uploaded to Nudge is not retained). The user should navigate to drive.google.com to see the gradebook with the message column (last column on the right of the gradebook).