Everyone has a role in student success at Drake.

Helping our students be successful is a team effort. Depending on your role within the institution, however, you will likely have very specific priorities and goals in mind when you think about how best to support your students. Starfish works with all members of our institution to address their specific needs.  Overall, the vision of Starfish is to help students succeed and graduate. It is an easy to use tool with a great user interface that gives faculty, students, and staff the opportunity to connect on another level.

Starfish was introduced at Drake in August 2018 as a communication tool that helps promote engagement that improves student outcomes. We are leveraging two components to help with student retention.

• Starfish Early Alert helps gather information about students so that they can receive help before circumstances cause them to fall behind.
• Starfish Connect helps create a bridge between students, professors, advisors, and tutors, to keep students on the right track. There are scheduling and communication elements built into this portion of the software.

When will Starfish be available?

With so much functionality within the Starfish system it will be implemented in a phased approach that will allow the end users time to learn and adopt the functionality in digestible portions. Below is a high-level implementation timeline of the proposed rollout of features and functionality. 

Fall 2018:
Phase 1 faculty teaching first-year student courses (107 faculty and lab instructors) will participate in early progress surveys and raise flags with individual student concerns.  Student services staff will manage outreach for flags and a small group will offer online appointment scheduling

Spring 2019:
Continue with early progress surveys and flags for individual concerns. 
Student services staff will expand use of online scheduling feature.

Fall 2019:
Expand group of faculty participating in early progress surveys.  Introduce features to support faculty advisors/mentors such as note-taking and online appointment scheduling.