ARTICLE INTENDED FOR:
Faculty and staff users of Starfish
INTRODUCTION:
Starfish by EAB is a student success system that facilitates communication among academic advisers, instructors, students, and others who are here to support student learning. At Penn State, Starfish integrates with our student information system (LionPATH) and is the main system for advising notes, progress surveys, and academic reviews, as well as for students to connect with their personal network of success services.
Roles and Relationships
Starfish is a role and relationship driven system. Each Starfish role creates a relationship to a set of students (e.g., students enrolled in a course). That relationship is active for a particular time frame (e.g., the semester that course is offered). To use Starfish, users must be in a Starfish role with at least one active relationship to a student. Please see the Starfish roles page to learn more about how roles work, available roles, and request processes.
Users are automatically granted Student, Instructor, TA, or Assigned Adviser roles based on information in LionPATH. Users may be delegated access to other Starfish roles as deemed appropriate by their local Starfish Role Manager. The Starfish Info site has detailed instructions for users in adviser, instructor, and student roles.
Typical Starfish Functions
Update your contact and profile information
Set scheduling deadline and meeting location preferences for appointments
Set up appointment blocks for student self-scheduling
Share information with students' academic support networks
Visibility of Information in Starfish
Information from LionPATH and Canvas is imported nightly to Starfish. Course affiliation, advising assignments, Canvas current grade, and student, faculty, and staff demographic information always reflect a snapshot from the previous day. LionPATH is the authoritative source for students' academic information.
Users can only see:
- Students with whom they are in an active relationship through a Starfish role. For example, instructors will be able to see students who are enrolled in their course for the current semester but not students who were enrolled in their course in a past semester.
- Students who are in an active status at Penn State. When students become inactive at the university, their Starfish records are retained according to university policy but become invisible to users. If the student becomes active again, visibility of the existing Starfish record is restored.
- Note: Inactive students can be made visible in Starfish by records managers using the LionPATH Starfish (ASF) Service Indicator.
- Student information appropriate to their role. Access to information in the student folder is restricted by role and is only shared with those who need it to do their job effectively. When creating a record in Starfish, privileges at the bottom of the screen will show who else can see that type of record within Starfish.
- Note: Private notes are not shown to anyone else in the student folder, but even notes marked as "private" can be seen in exported reports and should follow ethical guidelines for creating Starfish records. Anything truly private should not be recorded in Starfish.
Calendars
Starfish appointments can be viewed on an external calendar if a user chooses to have Starfish send .ical attachments in their user profile settings.
- Note: Accepting or rejecting this .ical will communicate back to Starfish, so a declined notification will cause Starfish to cancel the appointment.
Starfish can read external calendars if they are on Exchange servers. Starfish cannot read Google or UCS calendars.
Troubleshooting
Commonly asked questions are answered in the Starfish Troubleshooting Guide for Faculty and Staff Users and on the Starfish Info FAQ page.