Our Story

New Areas of Opportunity: Outside the Classroom

As VP of Product Strategy for Blackboard Inc., David Yaskin was researching the next generation of Blackboard solutions. Client feedback and industry trends pointed to two main focus areas:

1. Stimulate deeper levels of student engagement to promote student success
2. Assess outcomes to ensure continuous improvement and provide better accountability

The deeper he dug the more it became evident that activities within the classroom, Blackboard's primary focus were only a few notes in a chorus of opportunities to impact students. Factors outside the classroom had equal, if not greater impact!

The Challenge: Help Students Through College

More specifically, institutions are looking to find effective ways to help students overcome the traditional obstacles - academic, cultural, social, and financial challenges - and to connect a student's pursuit of a degree to internal motivators that would inspire him or her to work through these types of obstacles. Advising, tutoring, mentoring programs, instructor office hours, and counseling have all been shown to positively impact retention and graduation by identifying student motivators and helping to remove obstacles. In fact, studies have shown that the broader the range of success services used by a student, the better off they are. In addition, services delivered by peers such as peer tutoring often have the best outcomes, cost the least, and provide leadership opportunities for the students delivering such services.

Little Technology Support: Disparate Solutions

While the academic community has embraced technology to support the teaching and learning missions and administrative functions of an institution, it is clear from the research that technology is lacking in the area of student success program delivery and management. To date, modern, enterprise-class, integrated solutions do not exist. Disparate companies offer individual parts of the retention solution – such as online advising tools, scheduling for tutoring, or student information system (SIS) analysis for students at risk. Starfish Retention Solutions is the only provider that offers an integrated suite for supporting the delivery and assessment of the most effective student success programs.

A New Beginning: Engaged Campus Communities

David has effectively partnered with both school faculty and administrators across the country to bring about Blackboard's success and the success of e-learning. With Starfish, he is leveraging this experience and knowledge to transform how campus communities engage with students outside of the classroom to positively impact student retention and graduation. Starfish will be focused on a core set of objectives with an end goal of graduating more students:

• Provide community-based student retention solutions that make delivering and assessing student success services easier and more affordable.
• Promote current research about how student success programs impact retention and graduation.
• Encourage continued research focused on how to enable college students to succeed.

Sign up for our newsletter to stay abreast of our work towards these goals.