Student Success

Starfish Enterprise Platform Adds View into Community Data

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 03/01/18

Ed tech company Hobsons is opening up its student success database — at least a little. A new capability in the company's Starfish Enterprise Success Platform will allow Starfish users to browse interventions from other colleges or universities, helping generate new ideas for their own student success efforts. The company made the announcement during Achieving the Dream's annual conference.

The Enterprise Success Platform consolidates data from multiple sources on campus to give users — including advisers, faculty members and administrators — a more complete view of a given student and the efforts that have been made in working with that student. The Student Success Matrix (SSMx), a framework introduced in version 7 of Starfish, is a tool for defining and communicating student supports across the campus, covering "known risk predictors."

Now SSMx can be used to: browse interventions catalogued by other institutions, using various filters; identify, define and measure student interventions in place across a lone institution; and share verified student support practices with the Starfish community.

"Our clients are reaching milestones quicker than ever because they aren't doing it alone, but working with thought leaders like Achieving the Dream," said Howard Bell, Hobsons Starfish senior vice president and general manager, in a press release. "With SSMx sharing, Starfish clients are able to harness the insights from their own data, their own departments and now their colleagues across higher education to catalyze change in their student success community."