Beginning this semester, Georgia Southwestern State University has added a new tool to aid in student success. The program called Beacon (a Campus Labs product) is a web-based early alert system, and its main purpose is to identify students that might be lacking the resources they need to succeed and to connect these students to those resources.

To accomplish this, each student in Beacon is assigned a student success network. The network is uniquely tailored to individual students. Members of the student success network include a student’s academic advisor and other members such as coaches for student athletes, the first-year advocate for first-year students, residence hall coordinators for students that live on-campus and other faculty and staff who have regular contact with individual students.

According to Helen Tate, associate vice president for Academic Affairs, “[The] goal is to help our students to be as successful as they want to be both in their academic work and with their college experience as a whole. Beacon allows us to communicate and work as a team to help students reach their goals.”

If a student appears to be struggling in a certain area, an alert is sent out on Beacon to the student’s success network. This allows members of the network the opportunity to respond to the student in an appropriate manner. Members can offer students advice or encouragement and help students find resources they need to succeed.

One of the biggest benefits of the alert system is that it allows members of a network to respond within a timeframe that is more beneficial to the student. In the past, midterm grades were the earliest notification that advisors received if students were struggling. This meant that advisors could not begin addressing academic issues until after midterm.

Georgia Southwestern implemented a new early alert system this year to aid in student success.

This fall, 413 alerts relating to academic performance were posted prior to midterm. Because of this, advisors and other support staff were able to begin addressing academic issues for some students much earlier than they had been able to in past semesters.

“The main success to me,” said Bryan Davis, director of Institutional Effectiveness and Planning, “is that more students have gotten advice and assistance that may positively influence their academic performance earlier than they might have in the past.”

In addition to the alert system as a means of improving student success, the Beacon system also offered a Student Success Inventory (SSI) survey to all incoming first-year students, taken at the beginning of the semester. 

The survey focused on some of the non-cognitive factors that were the best predictors of a student’s success in college. The survey gauged student responses on topics from academic engagement and educational commitment to campus engagement and social comfort. Upon completion of the survey, the Beacon system generated reports for students and their success networks and recommended on-campus resources.

Students were able to review their results in categories from academics to social life so that they could have an idea of the types of outlooks with which they were approaching college.

So far, 693 alerts have been entered, and 38 percent of the alerts have received responses from student success networks and have been lowered. Further data is being gathered on the effectiveness of early alerts on student success rates.

For additional information, call (229) 931-2037.