Product release enhances support to students before enrollment, improves student interfaces, and deepens data integration capabilities
[1]Hobsons has launched Starfish 6, the latest release of the Starfish [2] student success platform.
The Starfish platform is used by innovative colleges and universities across the country and globally to scale student success programs so that more students can achieve their academic and life goals. The platform identifies students who need intervention and encouragement, pinpoints areas of concern, connects students with valuable services, and helps assess which services and interventions will keep students on track.
The latest updates to the Starfish platform reflect feedback from universities in the client community, and include:
- Expanded Advising Support. Starfish 6 extends the platform’s powerful meeting and communication capabilities to engage prospective students before they arrive on campus. Prospective students often meet with advisors to discuss career aspirations, financial challenges, and academic plans before they make their enrollment decisions. Often, information from these critical meetings is never integrated into the student’s record. With Starfish 6, staff can engage students and track outcomes of these meetings even without a student ID. When the student enrolls, notes and messages from the meetings can appear alongside data from other campus technologies.
- Friendlier Student Interface. What if campus staff could help students navigate their own challenges before the data indicates a problem? Starfish 6 features an updated agenda-style interface designed to support all students – not just those predicted by an algorithm to be “at risk.” Without new logins or passwords to remember, students can see their progress, ask for help, schedule appointments, and follow specific steps to manage common academic and administrative concerns.
- Streamlined Data Integration. Campuses are awash in data, but often lack the tools to integrate across systems to ensure that critical information is available to the right people at the right time.
Starfish 6 introduces simplified data files and hosted adapters to ensure that data from many sources can be used to generate a holistic picture of every student.
“For the past eight years, the Starfish Enterprise Success Platform has been an integral part of student retention and completion efforts at more than 250 institutions,” said David Yaskin, founder of Starfish Retention Solutions and Senior Vice President of Student Success at Hobsons. “Now, as part of the Hobsons portfolio of higher education solutions, we are excited to introduce these new tools to engage a broader range of college and university staff in student success.”
Material from a press release was used in this report.