Live workshop
€1,849
60-minute live faculty workshop plus Q&A, recorded for staff who cannot attend. Built on the maps from your four audited courses, so the examples are yours.
For educators & teaching centres
Disengagement isn’t a student problem. It’s a design problem.
Engagement is designed, not summoned. This is where the design work lives: what actually causes a course to shed students, which mechanics close which leak, and how any of it gets built in the LMS you already have.
What the design lens says
The week you are losing them is not the week it shows.
Three things that are true of almost every course we map, and that almost no course is structured around.
Attendance is a lagging indicator
By the time a lecture is half empty the decision was made three weeks earlier, usually at the first assessment that returned a grade with no route to improve it. The week you are losing them is almost never the week it shows.
Effort has to be legible to be repeated
Students stop doing work whose effect they cannot see. Most disengagement we map is not apathy — it is a feedback loop long enough that the connection between working and improving has gone invisible.
A mechanic is a hypothesis, not a decoration
Points, badges and leaderboards are answers. The question is which leak you have. Bolted on without a diagnosis they change the dashboard and nothing else, which is why gamification has the reputation it does.
The mechanics, by family
A mechanic is an answer. First you need the question.
Twenty-five mechanics group into four families, each a set of mechanics that works on the same thing, such as making progress visible or giving students choice. Which family you need is a diagnosis; which mechanic inside it is a matter of your platform and your cohort.
Progress and visibility
Making accumulated effort legible — completion maps, mastery ladders, visible skill trees. The family that addresses the most common leak, and the easiest to build badly as a progress bar nobody believes.
Low-stakes retrieval
Frequent, ungraded, immediate. It moves outcomes more reliably than almost anything else and it is the family instructors resist most, because it looks like more marking and is not.
Social and collaborative
Team goals, peer review with a rubric, cohort challenges. High ceiling and high risk: the same mechanic that builds a cohort can isolate the students already least attached to it.
Autonomy and choice
Assessment menus, branching pathways, negotiated deadlines. Cheap to implement, disproportionately effective for students juggling work or care, and the family that most often survives a change of instructor.
All twenty-five, with the failure mode of each and build notes for Moodle, Canvas and Blackboard, are in the Vault — free, and you do not have to buy anything to use them.
Methodology
The “Human-Core” Framework™
The same three-step method as every other engagement here, applied to a course instead of a manuscript.
Map
Your syllabus, your LMS layout and one recorded session, read week by week against the points where courses lose people. The output is a Design-Risk Map, not a score.
Prescribe
Five mechanics chosen for the leaks you actually have, each with its failure mode named, and each with build notes for your platform rather than for a platform in a paper.
Hand over
Teaching artefacts you keep and can put in a promotion file — the map, the rationale, the build steps and the before-and-after you will be able to point at next year.
Seven to ten working days from the point your materials are complete.
Course Engagement Audit scopes and pricing
Put it to work
Have it done on your own course
The Design-Risk Map, the five mechanics and the build notes, applied to a course you teach. Same diagnostic at every scope — the difference is how much of it is live and how many courses it covers.
| Feature | Single Course€399 | Async Audit€299 |
|---|---|---|
| Full syllabus & LMS layout review | Included | Included |
| Lecture analysis (up to 90 minutes) | Included | Included |
| Design-Risk Map, week by week | Included | Included |
| Five plug-and-play mechanics | Included | Included |
| LMS-specific implementation notes | Included | Included |
| Debrief | 30-minute live call | Recorded 25-minute walkthrough |
| Follow-up | 14 days of email Q&A | Email follow-up |
| Cross-course consistency report | Not included | Not included |
| Tenure-ready teaching artefacts | Included | Included |
| Choose a tier | Choose Single Course | Choose Async Audit |
The full case for the audit (the six deliverables, the Design-Risk Map itself, how the diagnostic runs) lives on the service page. Departmental and CTL programmes are on the institutions page.
For departments and teaching centres
Department & CTL scope
Up to four courses, mapped together. Delivery mode changes the price; the diagnostic does not.
- Up to four courses, each with its own full syllabus and LMS review
- Lecture analysis per course, and a Design-Risk Map per course plus a cross-course view
- A cross-course consistency report your programme committee can act on
- A shared mechanics playbook rather than five mechanics per course
- 60-minute faculty session and one week of asynchronous email follow-up
- A departmental summary alongside each instructor’s own teaching artefacts
Hybrid
Our recommendation
€1,69945–60 minutes pre-recorded for faculty to watch on their own schedule, followed by a 30-minute live Q&A. Your team receives the complete four-course audit walkthrough asynchronously, so only the Q&A requires a fixed slot on your department calendar.
Pre-recorded
€1,549Self-paced modules, a written Q&A document answering your faculty’s submitted questions, and one week of asynchronous email follow-up.
For departments and teaching centres
Buying this for a department?
We invoice institutions directly and supply the paperwork your finance office asks for. No card required.
Individual faculty: this is a standard use of professional development funds — ask us for a scope-of-work paragraph you can paste into the request. Teaching centres and departments: we issue formal invoices and accept purchase orders.
The Fit Guarantee
Before work starts, if the audit is not the right fit for your course, your discipline or your students, you get a full refund or a credited switch — your choice, no arbitration.
After delivery, if the work misses the brief we agreed, tell us within 14 days and we revise it once, free. If the revision still misses it, half the fee comes back as a refund or a credit, your choice.
Quick answers
Objections, handled
Is gamification not just points and badges?
Points and badges are two mechanics out of dozens, and they are the two most often applied without a diagnosis — which is why the field has the reputation it does. The work here starts from where a specific course loses specific students and chooses the mechanic that addresses that leak. Sometimes the answer is a mechanic; often it is a change to sequencing or feedback timing that no badge would have fixed.
Do you need our student data?
No, and we will not take it. We work from your syllabus, your LMS layout and one recorded session — never a roster, never grades, never names. That is a design constraint rather than a policy: a diagnosis that needs identifiable student data is a diagnosis that creates a data-protection problem for you before it solves a teaching one.
Will this survive me handing the course to someone else?
That is one of the things it is built for. The deliverables are documents rather than a configuration in one instructor’s head: the map, the rationale for each mechanic, and the build steps. A colleague picking the course up gets the reasoning, not just the settings.
We are a whole department, not one course.
Then the Department scope is the one to look at — up to four courses, a cross-course consistency report, and a faculty session. It is quoted and invoiced rather than bought with a card, and the delivery mode is your choice. The scope band below has the detail and the routes to a purchase order.
The Edge · fortnightly
One fixable objection, every other Tuesday
Start where the drop-off is