Elevate

Developed in collaboration with the Division of Undergraduate Studies (DUS), Elevate provides academic advisors with timely, actionable insight into a student’s online course activity. Available as a website and integrated with the Starfish Advising platform, Elevate supports proactive advising strategies designed to empower student success.

Building safety nets through data

Elevate was created during the pandemic as a means to identify students that might be struggling to engage online course materials due to COVID-related challenges. The easy, user-friendly layout enabled advisors to rapidly identify students who displayed a disproportionate decline in their online activity compared to their peers in the same course. This work helped advisors identify periods of low engagement for students that could be attributed to a lack of appropriate technology, caring for a sick family member, becoming ill themselves, or the many other valid personal reasons.

While students have largely shifted out of the most immediate challenges faced during the early stages of the pandemic, Elevate has proven itself as a useful tool to continue to support student success initiatives based on student activity. Elevate is now available to any academic advisor at Penn State that has access to an advising roster in Starfish.

The Interface

The interface is designed to provide a window into a student’s online activity associated with a course. In Elevate, an academic adviser can view the activity that occurs across their Starfish Advising roster.

An adviser’s view of their advising roster, including low-activity warnings (yellow) where students are significantly less active in learning tools, such as Canvas, TopHat, compared to their peers, and no-activity alerts (orange) where a student hasn’t registered any online activity for seven consecutive days.

Selecting a student’s name from the roster will bring up their profile page that provides a quick summary of important information about the student gathered from institutional data sources such as intended major and cumulative GPA. This page also displays the student’s online activity trends across their entire semester course schedule.

Selecting any course will display the graphs that illustrate the students’ online activity in this course since the start of the semester. This example illustrates a case where the student experiences a significant drop-off in activity from spring break through mid-April. It turned out this student was quarantined while trying to return to their home country.

Elevate Advising Course Activity Graph Screenshot

As learning environments evolve to meet the challenges of the ongoing public health crisis, being able to leverage data in a way to provide proactive outreach to support student success has never been more important. Elevate is an application that helps identify individual students who are disengaging from their Canvas courses and represents another tool to provide academic advisers with appropriate and timely insights about their students. Being able to tailor our outreach to the specific circumstances of individual students strengthens our ability to support the right students at the right time.

David R. Smith, Ph.D.
Associate Dean for Advising and Executive Director
Division of Undergraduate Studies
The Pennsylvania State University

Data and Student Engagement

Elevate is built on leveraging the online activity data that students generate when they interact with an online course tool such as Canvas. Any time a student performs a learning action, such as answering a quiz question or posting in a course discussion forum, they generate a digital footprint, an event log of their activity in the tool.

Elevate leverages the Unizin Data Platform (UDP) that provides access to the vast collection of activity data that occurs in learning tools such as Canvas, TopHat, Kaltura, etc. Through the UDP, modern data science techniques are used to sift through this data to provide actionable insight that advisors can use. Through this innovative technology, when a student’s activity drops significantly compared to other students in a course, Elevate can generate alerts that appear alongside the student in Starfish.

In addition, Elevate shows how much the student is engaging with their online classwork each week, over the entire semester, and even on a daily basis. With this information readily available, advisors can:

Identify students that may need assistance,
Understand how students are engaging with their courses, and
Help students understand how their engagement with courses can impact their ability to succeed