Always Alert is Gordon State College's early alert academic intervention program. The program is intended to help students at-risk of not succeeding in one or more classes. The program relies on volunteer faculty academic coaches to conduct one-on-one meetings. The program uses Navigate to facilitate outreach, appointment-making, and record-keeping.
Currently, the program works based on ad-hoc alerts submitted by faculty in Navigate and by scheduled progress reports. Progress reports are sent out during the 5th and 10th week. Instructors can also submit Always Alert referrals at other times. Instructors are provided with four reasons for progress reports or ad-hoc alerts. Alerts in Navigate trigger an email to the at-risk student and their advisor. Emails include supportive information and information about resources on campus. If instructors select "Poor Grades" as an alert reason, the student receives an email prompting them to make an appointment with an academic coach.
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Evaluation Plan and measures:
The program's efficacy will be measured by analyzing data collected through Navigate and surveys sent to students.
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KPIs:
KPI 1. The percentage of unique students who received alerts and made an appointment. KPI 2. The pass rate of students who attended appointments versus those who received alerts and did not attend appointments. KPI 3. Overall student success and retention (FTFT year-over-year comparisons) KPI 4. Student perception of the program as it relates to the institution's interest in their success. KPI 5 (new for Fall 2024). Faculty participation. KPI 6 (new for Fall 2024). Students marked at-risk on progress reports.
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Baseline measure (for each KPI):
KPI 1. One scheduled appointment in Navigate per unique student. KPI 2. The percentage of students who attended Always Alert appointments who earned an ABC versus the percentage of students who received a notification to attend an Always Alert meeting but did not make an appointment or respond to the nudge. KPI 3. Percentage growth year-over-year in FTFT students. KPI 4. The percentage of survey respondents who answer that they believe the Always Alert program is beneficial to them or their peers. KPI 5 (new for Fall 2024). The number of faculty that participate in progress reports – 86% (average of AY 23-24 progress reports) KPI 6 (new for Fall 2024). 12% for Progress Report #1 (average of FA 23 and SP 24 Progress Report #1) and 18% for Progress Report #2 (average of FA 23 and SP 24 Progress Report #2)
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Current/most recent data (for each KPI):
KPI 1. We have problematic data. Students are selecting the "Always Alert" service in Navigate for non-Always Alert meetings. We are overhauling the organization/workflow within Navigate this summer and should have a better system in place for Fall 24.
KPI 2. We have low/limited data. Due to the problem associated with KPI 1 and other issues, we do not have sufficient data to measure this KPI. We should see an improvement in Fall 2024.
KPI 3. .09% increase year-over-year. Retention was 48.8% for FA 21 and 49.7% for FA 22.
KPI 4. No data
KPI 5 (new for Fall 2024) - Fall 2024 - 95% for Progress Report #1 and 91% for Progress Report #2 KPI 6 (new for Fall 2024) - Fall 2024 – 11% for Progress Report #1 and 13% for Progress Report #2
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Goal or targets (for each KPI):
KPI 1. 90 per semester. This is roughly 3% of our total population. According to our data, between 10% and 20% of students are "at-risk" starting after Week 5. KPI 2. To be determined KPI 3. 1% per year. KPI 4. A majority responded that the program benefits students (>50%). KPI 5. > 90% KPI 6. < 11 for Progress Report #1 and < 13 for Progress Report #2
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Time period/duration: Spring 2026 |
The last year has been a big one for Always Alert. Always Alert was relaunched in Spring 2023. We had to re-enlist faculty volunteers and reconceptualize the program. During the last year, we've built a group of 15 academic coaches (mostly faculty, but a couple of staff). We have trained Academic Coaches with best practices for consulting with students about the struggles they face in class.
In relaunching this new system, we have created four distinct emails for four alert reasons that instructors can select progress reports or when they submit ad-hoc alerts. Once those alerts are issued, students receive the emails. The "Poor Grade" alert results in students receiving an email with supportive words and a matrix of Academic Coaches they can choose to meet with. When students choose a coach, they are forwarded to the coach's Navigate personal availability page, where they can make an appointment. This system works relatively well in terms of workflow, as appointments in Navigate are automatically fed to faculty Outlook calendars. In addition, Navigate sends appointment reminders to the coaches and students.
The biggest problem with this system is that students likely have too many choices to choose from when selecting a coach. In addition, many coaches have limited availability, forcing students to select several coaches to find availability that fits their schedule. These extra steps lower the likelihood of students successfully scheduling an appointment. This has resulted in a relatively small number of appointments being scheduled under this system.
Update for Fall 2024 -
We have been evolving Always Alert to better suit the needs of students. One change we made was to move our second progress report to Week 11. This provides more time for progress updates between midterm grades and the progress report. We have also used automated processes in Navigate to make the alert system more effective. In this new process, progress report alerts and ad-hoc alerts entered by instructors are fed into an appointment campaign which runs continuously and nudges students to seek help from an academic coach. The appointment campaign feature allows students to click one button and select a time/day to meet with any available academic coach. The previous system emailed the student with supportive messaging and provided a grid for students to choose individual academic coaches. This issue was that students would have to select several coaches to find a time/day that worked for them. This decreased the number of appointments that students made. For our second progress report in Spring 2025, this new automated process increased appointments by 30%. Unfortunately, we ran into some hiccups for Fall 2024, when we tried to use the same appointment campaign for ad-hoc alerts, progress report 1, and progress report 2. The system did not add students to the nudge campaign more than one time, so if a student was marked at-risk for progress report 1 and 2, they would only receive nudges to book an appointment for progress report 1. For Spring 2025, we will be using different appointment campaigns so that students can be added to more than one campaign if they receive multiple at-risk alerts (during different times of the semester). Regardless of the issues we encountered with the automated system, we continued to see substantial faculty participation in the progress reports, with over 90% of faculty participating in the Week 5 and Week 11 campaigns in Fall 2025.
To fix the above problem, we will overhaul the workflow of the system in Navigate. We will designate a Student Success Center staff member as a case manager for Always Alert. In the new system, "Poor Grades" alerts will create an open "case" within Navigate. The SSC staff member will manage that case and work to connect at-risk students with Academic Coaches. We believe this new system will result in many more completed/successful academic coaching appointments. We will implement this system for Fall 2024.
We believe this new system will also allow us to streamline data collection for the program.
Update for Fall 2024 – We need to adopt the solution discussed above. In addition, we need to do a better job of pairing at-risk students referred to through Always Alert with support services. One solution for this may be to find a case manager for different types of at-risk alerts, so that person can review the alerts, pair them with resources, and conduct follow-ups.
The biggest challenge we face is making sure that the workflow works the way it is supposed to. In addition, we need to advertise the program and let students know its purpose is to help them succeed. If students do not believe in the program, they will not make or attend a meeting with an academic coach.
Update for Fall 2024 -
In addition to the above workflow issue, we need to identify a staff member to manage cases (as discussed in the plan for the year ahead).
