Notifications
Success Network Notifications
Success Network members can create Notifications about their students and comment on notifications created by other advisors.
Alerts
Alerts denote a serious problem where action needs to be taken by the Success Network on behalf of the student. Open Alerts elevate the profile of a student in many areas of the Advisor's user interface to reinforce their importance and immediacy.
Once addressed, a Success Network member can "lower" an alert to remove its elevated status. A comment describing how the alert was dealt with is required to lower an alert.
Updates
Updates are used to share information and notate details about regular interactions with a student.
Encouragements
Encouragements are a mechanism for positive, strategy-focused feedback to students. Encouragements leverage the ideas theorized in Carol Dweck's Growth Mindset methodology that encourages a student’s hard work and positive attitude, rather than focusing on any innate ability.
System Notifications
There are also three types of Notifications created by the system.
Data Insights
Data Insights watch for changes in the data of each user and create an notification when certain conditions are met. Triggers for Data Insights can be set on various data streams in the system and are very powerful tools to alert advisors to changes in a student’s record. If the conditions triggering a Data Insight are very important, that Data Insight can be elevated to an Alert and will necessitate Success Network intervention to close it.
Learn more about Data Insights
Check-Ins
When a student checks-in to a Location on campus, a Check-In notification is added to their Success Stream. Many advisor interactions end with an advisor suggesting the student seek out certain resources or services on campus. These notations close the loop on those recommendations.
Messages
Any message sent through the Group Messaging tool is recorded on the student's Success Stream for future reference.
Creating Notifications
This section discusses how Success Network members create notifications.
In Beacon
Most notifications are created by clicking the "Create Notification" button on the Student Report. Advisors select the type of notification they want to create, assign it an audience, include a description and have the option assign a category (Alert and Updates only).
Faculty Experience
When a campus is using the Faculty Experience product with Beacon, faculty members can create notifications about their student’s from their course roster.
Quick Notification Widget
We also created a widget builder that campuses can use to place a notification creation widget anywhere in their system. The campus can set the widget to allow anyone on campus to create a notification about a student. This allows peers or staff who may not fall into a traditional advisory role to have access to a student's Success Network to voice concerns or share information.
How notifications impact the system
Success Stream
All notifications appear in the Success Stream on the Student’s Report according to their audience settings. The most recent notifications appear at the top of the stream in descending chronological order.
Due to their importance, Open Alerts are highlighted in pink.
Advisor's Landing Page
A running list of all notifications created about an advisor's cohort is shown on the left.
On the right, is a list of all an advisor’s connected students. The students with the most Open Alerts are displayed at the top of that list in descending order. This list is dynamic and will change as Alerts are opened and lowered.
Global Alerts Count
A dropdown list of the top ten students with the most open alerts is available in the top navigation bar throughout Beacon for easy reference and access.
Daily Digest
Advisors can choose how to be notified that new notifications have been created. They can choose to receive an email immediately upon creation or one email daily with a digest of all notifications created the previous day. Advisors love the Digest feature because they can quickly know first-thing each morning if there are any pressing matters in Beacon that need addressing.
Notation Reporting
The Notation Report shows all Updates and Alerts created in a given time frame. The administrator can see creation frequency and counts broken down by notation author and category. This report can also be filtered by category or author. A downloadable .csv file of all the data is also available at the bottom of the report.
Learn more about Reporting in Beacon