Impact of Starfish
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"It is important that we provide systems and tools to our faculty and student services personnel that support our efforts to foster a student success culture. Starfish is offering us an effective technology platform from which to identify those students who need help and then keep track of our efforts to intervene and provide support."
Dr. Bryan Tippett
Vice President of Academic Affairs
Estrella Mountain Community College -
"At Ivy Tech Community College - Terre Haute, we utilized Starfish to proactively ask our instructors for feedback on their students within the first four weeks of the term. Research shows that if we can reach at-risk students during this period of time, our chances of helping them succeed are dramatically improved. To our delight, 70 percent of instructors surveyed responded within eight days of our request, raising more than 1,060 flags. Now that we have the information, we are utilizing Starfish to document our efforts to connect with the identified students and introduce the services that we offer to help overcome their challenges."
Allen Lindsay
Assistant Director of Retention
Ivy Tech Community College - Terre Haute -
"We have selected Starfish to help us make certain that our faculty and advisors are looking at the same indicators of student success and following the same workflow to ensure that we are getting to students as quickly as possible to offer help and keep them on track. With Starfish, we are now able to spend more time helping students instead of being caught up in paperwork."
Niki Whiteside
Vice President of Educational Technology
San Jacinto College -
"Starfish has a fundamentally different perspective on how institutions can help their students be successful. The approaches of other retention systems on the market today focus mostly on student groups from specific cohorts. However, if a college or university wants to provide individualized support to ALL students, I think that Starfish is a system that truly provides the necessary edge to deliver results. The new enhancements in Starfish 2 offer friendlier interfaces that allow any institution to offer tools that enable instructors, advisors, and support staff to communicate, creating a real '˜Personalized Support Network' that promotes the success of each individual student. In addition, I firmly believe that the new enhancements in Starfish 2 will support analytics reporting with ease, to assess and model the effectiveness of retention strategies."
Dr. Al Valbuena
Vice President for IT
Bowie State University -
"In an online class, there is no 'back row' from which a teacher can draw in a disinterested student. One of the best ways to gauge student engagement is to keep track of how often they log in to their online courses. Unfortunately, this is also one of the greatest challenge. With Starfish, we will know this in real time, and be able to reengage students and get them back in the class."
Ryan Gravette
Technology Director
Idaho Digital Learning Academy
Simplicity and Ease
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"This has been one of the most seamless integrations of a Building Block into Blackboard I've seen."
Ruth Newberry
Director of Educational Technology
Duquesne University -
"I was really delighted that the Starfish staff communicated so well with the UMW technology staff, both in the set up and in the trouble shooting. They are amazing, with nearly instantaneous turnaround time in responding to our queries."
Joann Schrass, Ph.D.
Associate Dean, Academic Services
University of Mary Washington -
"Our goal at EMCC is to ultimately improve our student success rate, as measured by course completion, retention and graduation metrics. To do this, we need to be able to focus on actually delivering services to students that need help - rather than spending time on the administrative process. The reporting function of Starfish also means we can easily track the effectiveness of interventions."
Dr. Lauren Shellenbarger
Dean of Student Services
Estrella Mountain Community College -
"The simplicity of Starfish makes it easy for our faculty, including a large percentage of adjunct professors, to communicate a concern they have for a student. Starfish takes the legwork out of simply getting a student in for help. In addition, because our team members receive the pertinent information about a student from Starfish, they are able to spend more time helping our students."
B.J. Landen
Counselor, CARE Center
Columbus Technical College -
"Academic institutions must make support services easily accessible to this highly mobile, digital and diverse student population. Within one week of using Starfish CONNECT, half of my 400 students made appointments with me with ease. The email notifications from Starfish allow me to prepare for each student appointment and understand any reasons for cancellations, which is important to me as an advisor. Starfish is clearly dedicated to making us successful so that we can focus on helping our students."
Keith Solarczyk
Academic Advisor for A.J. Palumbo School of Business Administration
Duquesne University
Right Solution, Right Time
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"I can't recall being this completely thrilled and hopeful about a new product since we first chose a CMS and went online over a decade ago. We have worked so hard (with great success) to pull up retention in undergraduate online courses. But the process has been extremely labor intensive, and I've always thought 'there's gotta be a better way.'"
Melanie Clay
Assistant Dean of Distance Learning
University of West Georgia -
"Given the current financial pressures facing higher education, improving student success and retention is an important priority for colleges and universities. A new generation of software solutions offers institutions the ability to identify in real time which students are struggling - providing an incredible advantage for an institution seeking to improve student retention. By connecting to course management systems, Starfish has created a powerful and efficient way of providing timely information that helps improve how at-risk students are identified and then connected to the myriad of institutional support resources that can help them succeed."
Nicole Engelbert
Lead Analyst
Datamonitor -
"For student convenience campuses are collocating student success programs such as advising, tutoring, disability services, and counseling into a single building. The Starfish Retention Suite is the natural online evolution of this trend."
Patricia Carretta
Assistant Vice President, University Life
George Mason University
"We are excited about the possibilities that Starfish will offer us at the University of Illinois at Springfield. We are using Starfish to replace our previous early warning system, to improve communication among faculty and staff on retention issues, and to replace outdated tracking and appointment systems in our campus advising center. Rolling all these services into one system will provide us greater efficiencies and the ability to help more students faster. "
Dr. Karen Moranski
Associate Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education
University of Illinois at Springfield
"The complexity of today's higher education environment requires alternative ways for institutions to engage their students. By removing the roadblocks all students, particularly first-generation students, experience when attempting to connect with instructors, advisors, and counselors, students are more likely to continue in their studies. Having a strategic system in place dramatically levels the playing field for students who may be at a disadvantage."
Dr. John R. Cowles
Associate Dean, Counseling, Advising & Retention Services
Grand Rapids Community College
Return on Investment
"With the deep adoption of the Starfish system and real-time sharing of information across campus, we have already seen a four-and-a-half-fold return on our investment in the technology and related program costs, including personnel. At the same time, the campus services that are empowered by the Starfish system are noticeably more efficient and better-prepared to help our students."
John Burke
Vice President for Business and Finance
Paul Smith's College
Funding Sources
"Bristol Community College has leveraged our Title III grant to support our students in new, more effective and efficient ways. Nearly every institution offers student support services. The sad reality across higher education is that those resources are often underutilized because students don't know where or how to access help. By incorporating Starfish into our program, we are now able to proactively engage students and drive them to help. We have had the support resources here - we just didn't always know which students to seek out. With Starfish, we do."
Ben Baumann
Academic Advising Specialist
Bristol Community College
