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Starfish and ctcLink Tools

Leaders

  • Megan Court – technology specialist, Academic and Student Success

Charge

Now that the initial set-up of the Starfish system is complete, we are continually working to expand its use and functionality for students and staff. Expanding use and functionality includes bringing in more departments and creating department tracking items, training new users, developing student facing media, surveying instructors, staff, and students to build out the system to best meet the needs of its users. The Starfish project requires ongoing collaboration between student services, administration, and instructional divisions.   

Status

Appointments 

Since May 1st, 2019, there have been 33006 appointments scheduled in Starfish, of which 8686 were scheduled by students themselves, roughly 26%. Since January 1 of this year, there have been more than 7900 appointments scheduled, or an average of 5285/month, which is up from 2019’s average of 3134 appts/month. 

Early Alert Pilot 

The Early Alert pilot in Fall 2019 provided valuable instructor and student feedback about how Starfish can be used to foster student success. For an in-depth review of the pilot outcomes, please see the Early Alert Pilot Fall 2019 Report. Although the sample size was quite small, two take-aways from the pilot were:  

  1. Students who received a Referral to Advising were likely to make seek out advising appointments, either making it themselves in Starfish or visiting the Advising Office. 
  2. Students indicated they would use Starfish more when they could schedule tutoring/writing support and instructor office hours through it. 

Tutoring  

Starting Winter 2020, all of South’s and Central’s tutoring programs are in Starfish. South is using Starfish kiosks in all their tutoring centers and using the system for drop-in and scheduled appointments. Central has 11 decentralized tutoring areas and MESA’s Academic Excellence Workshops. All tutoring services are visible in Starfish, including the AEWs, and all areas except Basic Studies (whose tutoring program uses volunteer tutors) use Starfish in some capacity—Apparel Design has yet to start, but are ready to go in the system. Conversations with the Director of the Student Learning Center at North about moving North’s tutoring services from their system to Starfish have begun. Mr. Tarker cautioned that tutoring faculty coordinators may be hesitant to change from their current system, which was built and is updated to fit their specific processes. I will be attending one of their meetings in the next few weeks to bring the conversation to the group. Ideally, North’s tutoring services will at least be visible to students in Starfish by the beginning of Spring 2020. 

Tracking Items (Notifications, Referrals, To-Dos, and Kudos) 

Conversations about how to use the Early Alert features available are ongoing. However, we are looking for current business processes that can be enhanced with Starfish and building them for departments. The goal is to have successful use-cases to show others as we build out the more traditional Early Alert items. 

  • Referrals 
  • WELL (South) 
  • Culinary Tutoring (Central) 
  • Notifications 
  • IEP Mid Quarter Progress Check (South)—only for IEP courses 
  • To-Dos 
  • TRiO Progress Report 
  • Running Start Orientation (South) 
  • MESA (book checkout, chromebook checkout, calculator checkout) 
  • Workforce Education Plan 
  • BFET Monthly Progress Check Form (Central) 
  • Success Plans 
  • New Student South 
  • Updated Seattle Promise plans (7 quarterly plans + summer) to track milestone completion by cohort and quarter. 
  • Progress Surveys 
  • Working with TRiO S to build their attendance check as a progress survey in Starfish to be used in Spring 2020. 

Strategic Analytics 

The Starfish Technical Team is currently building the files needed for the analytics functionality in Starfish.  The analytics tool will provide give student and course level information to help us identify student completion gaps, discuss factors that may contribute to those gaps, and help us develop and prioritize a plan of action.  Building the files has been a team effort, but most of the heavy lifting has been done by John Davis, IT’s designated Starfish support.  John and I have been digging in IR Datamart, and our ODS databases and pestering the IE team and others in our institution with questions.  We’ve made quite a bit of progress and hope the files are ready by the end of February to early March.     

Starfish Data Exporter 

We are now able to exporter data out of Starfish using the data exporter.  Plans are in place to use the exporter to upload Seattle Promise Milestones from Starfish into Azorus.   

All Instructor Survey 

A survey for all instructors will be sent out before 2/21.  The intent of the survey is to develop a fuller understanding of the work they already do to help student succeed in their courses, what they deem most important to student success, and ways Student Services and Administration can better support their efforts.  The results of the survey will inform which Early Alert tools we prioritize. Additionally, the survey will provide some data to support our process.