UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Starfish, a reporting system faculty can use to communicate with students about progress in their courses, will be integrated in Canvas on Friday, Aug. 18. Starfish is a robust student success system that can flag students at risk, pinpoint areas of concern, and connect students with valuable services and early interventions.
Faculty Senate Policy 47-70 says faculty should submit early progress reports prior to the late-drop deadline to help students evaluate and improve their academic performance. There are several ways faculty can report progress in Starfish.
Faculty who use Canvas can set up grade categories in Starfish of good, OK and fair, using percentage ranges they choose. They can then select all students from a grade category and choose which feedback should be sent to those students and their academic advisers through Starfish. This is particularly useful for providing feedback in large-enrollment courses.
As a recommended best practice, faculty should not set the default grade option for a given column in their course in Canvas until all assignment submissions have been graded. They also should wait until all submissions have been graded before setting the default grade for an assignment to zero. For more information, visit http://tinyurl.com/prep-final-grades and http://tinyurl.com/display-student-grades/.
For questions, contact LMSsupport@psu.edu.