1. Using STARFISH for Advising It’s for more than just appointments!
JeanEllen Melton, Title III Grant Data Analyst
Chelsea Bocard, Early Alert Manager
BCTC Mathematics & Statistics Division
September 22, 2017
Using STARFISH for Advising: It’s for more than just appointments!
JeanEllen Melton, Title III Grant Data Analyst & Chelsea Bocard, Early Alert Manager
Presented September 22, 2017 at the BCTC Mathematics & Statistics Division

2. Title III Grant Increase First Year retention
Increase faculty/staff access to and use of data
Starfish Enhancements (more than making appointments)
Student Network
Flag/Referral History
Advising Notes
Advising Documents
Course History
Student Demographics
Mandatory Placement
BCTC’s current title III grant is called “Substantive Reform for Closing the First Year Success Gap” or, more clearly, getting more students to their second year. The staff for the grant are housed in SDEM and our project director is Tania Crawford Gross. One objective that we are working on is increasing faculty and staff access to and use of student data to help you teach and advise in a more informed, more personal way. We’ve worked with Systems Office staff to bring several enhancements to Starfish, to give you more a “one stop shop” when looking for student information. Information you can now access in Starfish includes a Student’s Network, Flag & Referral History, Advising Notes and Documents, a student’s course history, and student demographics. The systems office is working to add test scores we use for mandatory placement to starfish, as well.

3. Early Alert System Chelsea Bocard, Early Alert Manager
Manages Starfish Communications
Flags
Referrals
Kudos
Raise Your Hand
Provides student outreach through Starfish
Chelsea Bocard, Starfish EAM (Student Success Specialist) is responsible for tracking all flags/referrals received at Bluegrass and providing outreach to these students. Depending on where we’re at in the semester determines which flags/referrals I reach out to. There are currently over 1,200 flags so currently I’m focusing on:
Advising referrals (those students that don’t yet have assigned advisors yet)
Students who raise their hand and need to talk to their academic advisor but they don’t have one yet.
I also am currently reaching out to “high priority” flags such as Recommended Drop, Danger of Failing, 6 + flags. I send the student relevant information/resources and let them know that I am a person at the college who can assist them.
Raise Your Hand is a Starfish feature that allows students to raise flags on themselves. Other Raise Your Hand reasons are: I need tutoring, I need counseling, etc. These go to appropriate personnel and myself.
The idea behind Starfish Early Alert System is to catch any issues early so that appropriate staff can intervene and make a difference. If issues are caught too late in the semester this can be detrimental for the student. We want students to be successful!

4. Accessing Starfish
Starfish is much more than making appointments with your advisees, but we wanted to start at the beginning to be sure you are all starting from the same place.

5. Accessing Starfish
To access starfish, you’ll go to the Faculty & Staff page of the BCTC website, and click on “My Path”

6. Accessing Starfish
Log in to My Path, then click on Starfish

7. Accessing Starfish
This brings you to the Starfish Home Screen, which is basically a dashboard of recent flag activity and appointments you have on your calendar.

8. Accessing Starfish-Setting up your profile
To set up your profile in Starfish, click on your name in the upper right corner to access the drop-down menu and click “institutional profile.”

9. Accessing Starfish-Setting up your profile
You can input your phone number, general overview, and biography. You can also upload a picture. Staff/faculty/students are able to view your profile. This personalizes Starfish.

10. Accessing Starfish-Scheduling Office Hours
As we’ve discussed, Starfish is useful for more than scheduling appointments, but getting those advising appointments scheduled is a valuable part of this tool. After you’ve set up your profile, this is probably the next thing you will want to do in Starfish.

11. Accessing Starfish-Scheduling Office Hours
When you click on the “Office Hours” button, you see a pop up window to Add Office Hours. This is where you’ll enter the basic office hours that you have available every week and that you publicize to your students in your syllabi. You have several options to choose from, but be sure you scroll to the bottom of the window:

12. Accessing Starfish-Scheduling Office Hours
…to click on the Start/End date tab. Many of you probably change your office hours from term to term after you know your course schedule. “Never” is the default in this window, but most of your will actually want to change the end date to “End of Term” or on a set date at the end of the semester. Don’t forget to click “Submit” or this never happened.

13. Accessing Starfish-Scheduling Office Hours
If you want to schedule large blocks of time of availability, like during priority registration, click the “Scheduling Wizard” button from the Home screen. This walks you through establishing blocks of availability a week at a time.

14. Working with Advisees
Now that we’ve established how to use Starfish for setting up appointments, we want to walk through how to view and contact your advisees and how to get the most benefit out of the student advisee information available in Starfish.

15. Working with Advisees-Viewing your advisees
Select Students at top of page and set “Connection” to academic advisor-assigned and “Term” as active.
You can also search for any student in search bar at top of page.
Note that this advisor has 57 advisees, and only 25 students are displayed at a time. Use the black arrow at the bottom of the screen to tab through screens.
If you’d like to download a list of all advisees to excel, click the “Download” button.

16. Working with Advisees-Emailing your advisees
You can send an message to students through Starfish. For example, you can let them know that priority registration is coming up and to make an appointment with you through Starfish. Check the top checkbox on the left side of the screen to select all students on the screen to send an to all of them. You can only send a message to 25 students at a time. Please note the number of pages (bottom of page). In the example above, fifty students are selected (two pages), so we would need to deselect this page by clicking the top checkbox.

17. Working with Advisees-Emailing your advisees
Complete the subject line and message, then click submit to send the to your student(s). Check the box to send a carbon copy to yourself.

18. Working with Advisees-Viewing Advisee Info
Over the next several slides, we are going to view a student’s individual student information. Click the tabs along the left side of the screen to see additional information.
Overview: This is where you can see an overview and any uploaded documents. You can also upload your own advising documents by clicking the File button. Uploaded documents are not visible to the student, but they can be viewed by other faculty and staff.

19. Working with Advisees-Viewing Advisee Info
Intake Form (demographics): The intake form provides a great deal of student preferences, goals, and history at a glance. Students can complete the intake form through their starfish account, or staff/faculty can complete the form while advising the student. It might be helpful to ask your advisees to complete the form prior to your advising appointment.

20. Working with Advisees-Viewing Advisee Info
Course History: Choose the appropriate Term to view different course history.

21. Working with Advisees-Viewing Advisee Info
Tracking: This is where you can review any flags that have been raised on the student so you can see what they have been struggling with or succeeding in (kudos).

22. Working with Advisees-Viewing Advisee Info
Meetings: This is where you can view any past or future meetings for the student.

23. Working with Advisees-Viewing Advisee Info
Notes: This is where you can view any general advising notes on the student. Flags also show up again here. You can also click on the notes button and leave a very general advising note of your own after each advising session. You can choose to make notes visible to students and others in their network.

24. Working with Advisees-Viewing Advisee Info
Network: The student’s success network is made up of the student’s academic advisor, instructors for a given term, and BCTC’s Early Alert manager, exam proctor, and tutoring center. A student can schedule appointments and view office hours, contact info or directly.

25. Working with your courses
Faculty might also want to know about some of Starfish’s features for instructors.

26. Working with your classes-Class Roster
When you click into the Students area, you can sort for students you teach and filter by course. Here you see the course roster. This is pulled nightly from PeopleSoft.

27. Working with your classes-Tracking/Flags
When you click on the tracking tab, you see all flags and referrals raised by any faculty members on all students in your course. As you can see, most flags are raised during scheduled Surveys, but you can do so at any time. Select a student by checking the box next to their name and click the Flag, Referral, or Kudos button.
Flags are concerns you have about the students’ academic process. Referrals refer students to a certain department (advising, tutoring, non-academic concern).
You can raise flags at any point in the semester, but there are 3 survey dates per semester where you can go in and raise flags. The first was September Thank you to those that participated in this survey!
Raise one flag per student (most important flag) and leave comments regarding other flag reasons in comment section. This will be less overwhelming for student. Once they get three flags raised, the SO automatically generates a fourth flag (3+ Flags).
Referrals (advising)-I’ve seen several that have a comment “in danger of failing”. In this case, raise that specific flag so that they student will get the information that they need.
Referrals (non-academic). These are only to be raised if student is suicidal, depressed, anxious, etc. These referrals go to our personal counseling department and are very serious. I’ve seen a few for issues such as tardiness. This would be an Attendance Concern flag.
You can raise an Academic or attendance concern flag and this will trigger automatic from the system which will give student tutoring information, etc. If you raise tutoring flag, student does not get an automatic ; a notification is sent to student and the tutoring department and it is up to the tutoring department on how they would like to handle these referrals.

28. Working with your classes-Tracking/Flags
Here, I clicked the Flag button, then I choose the flag from the drop down menu.

29. Working with your classes-Zoom In
When you choose the Zoom In tab, you see grade information for your course. If you are using the Grade Center in Blackboard for your class, then those grades are pulled into Starfish nightly. Use the Filter feature to identify missed assignments or those students struggling in your class.

30. Working with your classes-Attendance
Click the Attendance tab to record attendance or to view an attendance report. You can filter students by absence type or specific dates as well. You can easily raise an attendance flag from this page if you notice attendance concerns.

31. Questions?