Starfish for Faculty and Staff
Starfish is a comprehensive student success platform designed to help you proactively support and engage with your students. By providing early intervention tools and real-time insights, Starfish enables faculty to identify and assist students who may be struggling before they fall behind.
Starfish offers several key features to enhance personal connections with students. Streamlined communication allows faculty to send personalized messages to students and easily connect students with campus resources like counseling, advising and tutoring. An early alert system allows faculty to identify at-risk students and to create automated flags for missing assignments and consecutive absences while providing supportive, actionable feedback.
Remember that your expertise and care remain the most crucial elements to student success. Starfish simply enhances your connection with students!
Decades of research have demonstrated the critical role that advising serves in supporting student success, especially at community colleges which often serve a more vulnerable student body. Advising can help students identify their strengths and interests, access resources to support their academic success, and plan their educational journeys.
To: Montgomery College Divisions of Student Affairs and Academic Affairs
From: Dr. Deidre Price, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs/College Provost; Dr.
Ed Cabellon, Interim Senior Vice President for Student Affairs
Subject: Updates on College Advising Model and Next Steps
Date: November 19, 2024
Decades of research have demonstrated the critical role that advising serves in supporting student success, especially at community colleges which often serve a more vulnerable student body. Advising can help students identify their strengths and interests, access resources to support their academic success, and plan their educational journeys. Montgomery College has always understood this charge and has a long history of being committed to excellence in advising. As we strive to increase the access, completion, and post-completion success of our students, we understand that we must pursue the most effective and efficient ways to proactively and holistically advise students along their academic journeys. The strategic plan identifies the utilization of a common advising technology as a key strategy in this and one that will lead to increased equitable student retention and completion.
The journey to implementing such a technology began at MC in 2012 when the presidential Advising Steering Group developed a Developmental Advising Plan which included, in part, the recommendation to adopt a technology for documenting degree plans and tracking benchmarks to comply with the College and Career Readiness and College Completion Act of 2013. Subsequently, in Fall 2013 the Starfish system was launched which, in addition to supporting students’ degree plans and tracking of student progress, allowed for shared advising notes to enhance communication between areas.
In the decade or more since then, Starfish has been used at MC to document tens of thousands of student encounters, track and monitor students’ use of services, schedule appointments, and document academic plans. Moreover, in that same decade, Starfish as a software tool has continued to develop and expand its functions and capabilities to offer tools to streamline processes and workflows for everyone at the College working with students, including, for example: early alerts based on course-based student behavior such as attendance, missed assignments, or low grades; the ability to provide targeted feedback (including positive feedback!) and personalized messaging to students on a larger scale; easy creation of cohorts based on multiple criteria to support targeted messaging and interventions; and support network, services functions, and referrals that easily allow a student to access and request the help they need and for those working with the student to more effectively collaborate. In addition, the system is now even more flexible in how it is configured for different roles at the College, allowing for different user experiences including different types of appointments, notes, and referrals, and access to information about the students that is needed to support them.
We believe that a full adoption of Starfish is the most efficient means to achieving the strategic plan goal of implementing a common advising software. The Starfish of 2024 is neither the Starfish of 2012 nor just an advising software; it is a single approach to tracking a student’s engagement with MC and a powerful student success solution that can meaningfully advance progress toward our institutional priorities of access and completion.
We acknowledge that full adoption of the system will not happen quickly or perhaps uniformly. For example, there are decisions to be made for how to best utilize aspects of the system at MC for which we need your voice. As we as a College work over the coming months to review all of the functions Starfish now offers, evaluate how best to scale up those which we have successfully been using, and implement those we have not been, we need your help! We need your input on how to configure features for MC and what you need to be able to best leverage your use of the system to support our students. We will have a number of forums to allow for your participation in this process as well as, in time, professional development and support opportunities provided by our partners and EAB.
Answers to frequently asked questions and information to help you increase engagement with students enrolled in your courses.
Check out the Introducing Starfish by Hobsons, a Solution for Student Success videonew window for a few highlights!
You can check out some examplesnew window, including many community colleges that are using it for early alert, collaboration and communication, and student tracking/intervention. As a result, these schools have seen greater growth in graduation rates and exceeded their retention goals.
Just like how we see different medical professionals for different reasons and need all of these to be as healthy as possible, Starfish is part of a team of systems that serve different but related purposes. Starfish draws information from Banner (which is our SIS) and it can also integrate information from Blackboard (our LMS) making it a one-stop-shop for information about a student. Systems like Maxient and Accommodate serve specific functions for student information that is of a particularly sensitive nature and/or has compliance-related requirements. One strength of Starfish is the ability to configure the user experience for different roles at the college and to devise actionable workflows e.g. referring students for tutoring or counseling.
Advising is carried out differently depending on your role(s), level of training and relationship with your students. At MC, this work is most often carried out by faculty and staff with titles such as program advisors, instructional faculty, counseling faculty, department chairs, coordinators, coaches, mentors, and many others. The strategic plan envisions this work carried out in some form within a common advising technology.
In addition, to help support the work of those advising students, instructors have the ability to use an early alert system, make referrals, and otherwise raise concerns for students who need intervention.
Advising is not the only purpose of Starfish and we hope in time that anyone who works directly with students will find ways to leverage the system in their work.
Starfish is designed to help make things easier for everyone and so, after some initial time to review and acclimatize to the system, it should not add any time but rather will support efficiencies so we are all working smarter not harder.
Representatives from Student Affairs and Academic Affairs will serve on an Advising Task Force whose charge will be organizing next steps to implement previous cross-functional recommendations that will catalyze progress on a collaborative advising model. This group’s work will commence this month and end with a report at the end of February.
An important piece of this work will include a visit from EAB on December 6. Representatives from Student Affairs and Academic Affairs will receive an invitation to attend division-specific and cross-divisional meetings to see Starfish in action and to contribute to planning next steps. A key purpose is to evaluate future uses of the platform to meet needs in and beyond advising at MC. If you are interested in attending one of these meetings to learn more, please contact your supervisor. This is the beginning of a process with many and varied connection points for faculty and staff to engage with redefining the advising journey and updating our support infrastructure for all students.
Faculty with active teaching assignments are given access to Starfish automatically. If you are teaching this semester or seeking access in a different role (e.g., Program Advisor), you may need to request access. Starfish Login for Faculty & Staff (use your MyMC credentials).
Once you’ve logged into Starfishnew window, go to the navigation menu to setup your profile. Follow the Getting Started Guide (PDF, 
) for step-by-step instructions on how to update your contact and profile information
in Starfish.
Faculty with active teaching assignments are given access to Starfish automatically. If you are teaching this semester or seeking access in a different role (e.g., Program Advisor), you may need to request access. Starfish Login for Faculty & Staff (use your MyMC credentials).
During the semester, you may be asked to provide students with holistic early and mid-semester feedback. By completing Starfish progress surfoldveys sent to you, you can reinforce course expectations with students and alert their larger C.A.R.E. Network to concerns that may be impacting students in multiple courses. You will receive an email reminder when there is a new progress survey for you to complete.
After you complete the progress survey for a course, you will receive a thank you from Starfish to confirm the progress survey has been submitted. Any flags you have raised for students will automatically trigger email notification to the appropriate individual(s) on campus who will begin the outreach process with the student. Kudos for students will show up in the student notifications in Starfish and the student will also receive an email.
You can raise tracking items in Starfish at any time of the semester, not just during progress reporting periods. The earlier a concern is alerted, the better.
Starfish allows you to communicate to students and with others in their C.A.R.E networks at any time of the semester through the "Referral," “Flag” and "Kudos" buttons. Each Starfish role provides access to a different set of tracking items under each button.
When you raise a flag or kudo (manually), it will be saved under the Tracking area in the student’s folder in Starfish. Unless otherwise indicated, any comments you provide on the flag or kudo will be included in an email to the student.
When you make a referral, the student does not receive notification indicating that you have referred them to a particular office. Rather, that office will receive an automated email with information and applicable details regarding the student that was referred to them. They will then reach out to the referred student as needed.
When you raise a referral, it will be saved under the Tracking area in the student’s folder in Starfish. The person who resolved the referral has the option of "closing the loop" which would provide you with a note via email stating that the issue has been resolved. Clearing referrals is not required, but considered a best practice at MC. Unless otherwise indicated, any comments you provide on the referral will not be emailed to the student.
- Starfish Resource Hubnew window: The Starfish platform brings insight to student data and allows institutions to take action and serve students proactively. It removes complicated redundancies and barriers to modernize campuses and make student intervention easy and integrated.
- Student Success Best Practices Library:new window Supporting students in today’s changing environment with more than 360 best practices from across our research forums.
- Coming Soon
Complete the Starfish Assistance Request Formnew window to request assistance with the Starfish system.
Last Updated: 2/3/2025