The following updates were made to the Beacon system on 2/11/15

 

New Additions

Encouragement

We've added a new type of notation in the system specifically for positive, learning-focused encouragement of students who demonstrate the strategies consistent with success.  Rooted in Growth Mindset (Wikipedia | TED), the new Encouragement feature helps success network members recognize, document, and most importantly notify students about their progress towards learning.  Encouragement is different than a mere kudos or recognition of achieved outcomes, it's about support a student's growth as a learner.

 

Once saved students will receive an email with the details of the Encouragement:

 

Generalist role

We've added a new role to the system that helps campuses who do not use an assigned cohort model for all of their success network members.  The generalist role will grant users access to all student profiles, while withholding aggregate reporting capabilities.  This role is located above Advisor and below Executive in the role hierarchy. 

Notate from the faculty experience

To make it easier for faculty to generate Updates, Alerts, or Encouragement about students we've added a notation button to the faculty experience of Campus Labs. This new button will conform to all settings regarding which notation types are available and which students the faculty member should be able to document on behalf of.

Subtle user interface updates

In our continued effort to organize student data in clear and useful ways we've made a few updates to the visual representation within the system.

1. We've moved the Academic Success and Retention probabilities that are visible to all roles above Peer Advisor under the Assessments tab, to better indicate that these indicators are derived from the  Student Strengths Inventory scoring.
2. We've moved the open alerts count to just above the success stream and have added a count for lowered alerts
3. We've merged the Create Update and Create Alert buttons into a single Create Notification button throughout the system
4. The form that allows a user to create an update, alert, or Encouragement has been re-designed slightly for better screen efficient
5. Added a notification message on the student profile page when the user is not currently connected as a member of the student's success network

 

Maintenance Updates

• Ensured that HTML characters contained in hyperlinks did not count towards the maximum character limits in system messages
• Corrected an issue where location managers were not being properly redirected to their location settings page
• Added more documentation about the API
• Performance improvements