The Retention Center allows you to set up rules for notification and tracking of students who may be at risk of failing the course. However, it is unlikely that the default rules of this tool are a good fit for traditional CNU courses or for your style of teaching.


To customize existing rules, or add rules of your own in the Retention Center, click on the ‘Customize’ button on the upper right of the page.

Customize Button

The customize page will load.

To add a new rule, choose the button and select the type of rule.

Retention Center Add Rule

In the resulting dropdown menu, you will see four types of rules that you can create:

  • The Course Activity Rule can be set based on whether or not a student’s activity in a course drops below a given amount.
  • A Grade Rule can be set based on whether or not a student’s grade is below a given value, and can be set for either an individual item or the student’s overally grade in the course.
  • A Course Access Rule is set to notify you when a student has gone a given length of time without accessing the course at all.
  • A Missed Deadline rule is set to notify you when a student misses a deadline in the course. This rule can be set for a specific course item, or for all course deadlines.



The creating and editing rules pages will include different parameters to set according to which type of rule you select in this dropdown menu. In the below example, a grade rule is being created to alert the instructor if a user’s activity level in the course is 20% or more below average, meaning that they’ve started interacting with the course less. 

Retention Rule Information


To change an existing rule, mouse over the rule, click the dropdown, and select ‘edit’.

Edit Existing Rule


This is also where you choose whether or not rules will be seen in the at risk table on the main Retention Center page.


For additional help with setting up your Retention Center, contact Academic Technologies.

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