# An Early Warning System to Detect At-Risk Students in Online Higher Education
## 5 The Early Warning System: Dashboards and Feedback Intervention Mechanism
When graded, a feedback message is triggered to each student for notifying his or her warning level (predictive statement), as well as the feedback for the next assessment activities. The system distinguishes different situations depending on the warning level, and the feedback message is adapted depending on the specific situation. Green (G) means that the student is not at-risk when the TNR is greater than the minimum threshold of 75% established in Section 4.3 (i.e., the model is considered a high-quality model). In such a case the student receives a comforting message in order to congratulate him or her. Yellow (or amber) means that the student is not considered at-risk, but he or she can be in the near future. The feedback message alerts the student about his or her chances to pass and gives some recommendations to progress successfully in the course. In addition, the feedback message also contains explanations about the accuracy of the prediction because, in some cases, the prediction (may pass or may fail) is under the quality threshold. Therefore, information about the TNR and TPR constitutes one of the differences among the three different types of yellow messages (Y1, Y2, and Y3) that are sent in this case. The distinction of different situations in yellow messages constitutes  
Figure 6: Tabular dashboard for teachers to check the predictions for the students. an enhancement regarding the work presented in [3], where no such distinction existed. This is especially relevant in the case of students that, in spite of passing the assessment activity, the grade obtained is under the grade suggested by the predictive model (message Y2). Red and black represent that the student is at serious risk of failing or dropping out (at-risk student). When the student has submitted and failed the assessment activity, (R) is the most critical situation, although the effort of submitting the activity is positively valued by the teachers. In this case, the feedback message contains recommendations to get out of this situation. Also, the message suggests the student contact his or her teacher in order to talk about the difficulties the student is experiencing in the course. Potentially, this can derive in a more individual support. The case when the student has not submitted the last or the last two assessment activities (B1 and B2) is dealt separately from the previous case, representing a potential dropout student. The feedback message asks for the reasons for not submitting the activities and reminds the student of his or her options to pass the course (information about mandatory assessment activities and the final exam). Unfortunately, and depending on the timeline of the semester, the student can receive a feedback message confirming him or her that has hopelessly failed the course. In such a case, the student receives advice to avoid this situation the next time he or she enrolls in the course, and the proposal of tasks the student can perform before a new semester starts. From an educational point of view, the EWS is a powerful tool to reduce dropout and increase students' engagement. It is providing a constructive answer for not disappointing students. In the case of students that are not properly following the course, the system is pointing out how they can improve by showing them new opportunities and even the mandatory assessment activities remaining to successfully pass the course. Finally, students that have not submitted their assessment activities can provide very useful information to the teacher, not only to build better feedback messages for the next edition of the course but also to introduce enhancements in the next course editions (new learning resources, better course design, etc. ).