ARTICLE INTENDED FOR:
Faculty and staff users of Starfish
INTRODUCTION:
Starfish is a cloud-based software package that facilitates communication among academic advisers, instructors, students, and others who are here to support student learning. Starfish is the central platform for advising notes, early progress reports (EPRs), mid-semester progress reports, and online scheduling of advising and other 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 list of Starfish roles to learn more about available roles and request processes.
Users are automatically granted Student, Instructor, TA, or Assigned Adviser roles based on information in LionPATH. Users may request access to other Starfish roles.
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 calendar and meeting preferences
Publish your availability to students
Visibility of Information in Starfish
Information from LionPATH and Canvas are imported nightly to Starfish. Student, faculty, and staff demographic information, course affiliation, advising assignments, and Canvas current grade 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.
Users can only see 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.
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 decline notification will cause Starfish to cancel the appointment.
Starfish can read external calendars if they are on Exchange or Google servers. Starfish cannot read 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.