Newsletter | Starfish Retention Solutions

A Quarterly Newsletter from Starfish Retention Solutions

Starfish 3 is Here!

The latest release of our enterprise student success and retention platform

We recently announced the availability of Starfish® 3, our enterprise student success and retention platform. For the last 12 months, we have been hard at work in collaboration with our client community to develop the new features and functionality that are made available in Starfish 3.

Specifically, the enhancements enable:

Optimized Academic Advising. Starfish 3 includes innovative functionality to support the daily activities of academic advisors and advising centers. Features include SpeedNotes to simplify the note-taking process while making this advising activity more measurable by the institution. The system also includes improved student action plans through plan templates, the ability to support file attachments and virus scanning, advanced filtering and reporting, and kiosk/waiting room management.

Intelligent System Integrations. Starfish 3 builds on the company's history of enabling institutions to leverage the momentum behind their existing third-party systems by reusing both the data generated by the systems and the user community's training. Starfish 3 has built-in integrations with learning management systems, including single login and data mining of grades, login activity, and participation. New platforms supported with this release include Desire2Learn, Canvas, and Sakai. Starfish 3 also supports comprehensive integrations with Banner, PeopleSoft, and Colleague student information systems. In addition, the platform enables online advising and tutoring with its first ever integration with a Web conferencing and chat system, Blackboard Collaborate. Last, the platform extends its rich attendance tracking and flagging capabilities by making use of data from student response systems (also known as Clickers).

Enterprise Usability and Supportability. As a growing number of institutions view their student success and retention programs from a more global, institution-wide perspective, those institutions are seeking solutions that securely integrate with other campus systems while facilitating thorough testing and solid operations. As an enterprise solution, Starfish 3 responds to the needs of IT by offering enhanced functionality to support the scalability, usability, and testability of the platform within the institution's IT environment.

"Montgomery College has recently adopted the Starfish system. With the release of Starfish 3, the company has expanded not only on the platform's ability to support the growing scope of student success and retention programs on today's campuses but also on the platform's ability to support the specific needs of academic counselors and advisors," said Jamin Bartolomeo, associate dean for student services at Montgomery College in Maryland. "For example, we are very excited to begin using the SpeedNotes feature in Starfish 3, which will allow our counselors and advisors to take more comprehensive notes more efficiently. The new feature will also enable the college to understand all of the items that are being completed in an advising or counseling session and not just the general reason for the appointment. This data will be invaluable in our efforts to improve our advising and counseling processes."

>>read more

Did You Hear?

University Business included Starfish in their first annual Readers' Choice Awards. We are grateful for the recognition and appreciate the support of our community.

>>see who else was recognized

Starfish is Hiring! Join Our Team

We are always looking for motivated, creative, and hard-working individuals to join our team. We are currently accepting resumes for a number of positions within our Client Services, Product Development, Product Management, Operations, Marketing, and Sales teams. Let us know if you are interested or if you know someone that we should be talking to!

>>see our open positions

What's All the Buzz About Anyway?

If Starfish is new to you, or if it has been a while since you've taken a look at us, we invite you to spend a few minutes at one of the upcoming Webinars to see the latest and greatest that Starfish has to offer! To register, click on a link below (all times USA).

>>Feb. 5 at 3 pm ET

>>Feb. 12 at 3 pm ET
>>Feb. 19 at 3 pm ET
>>Feb. 26 at 3 pm ET