Summary
This article provides Degree Planner administrators, primarily academic or faculty advisors and associated staff, details about how Degree Planner works and how to find or build student plans in Starfish. It also describes the limits of administrative accounts and some cautionary advice about how best to use the tool. It is intended for Shoreline Staff ONLY.
Before you begin
This article is intended for Shoreline Staff ONLY. Most students and many other staff members will not have access to administrative features, so this article will likely not prove helpful to understanding or using Degree Planner. If you are not an administrator for Degree Planner or do not have access to view or change student plans, please use the link to learn about Degree Planner for students. This article also assumes you have some familiarity with Degree Planner, so it will not be replicating information provided in the Knowledge Base articles for students, instead supplementing it with the additional powers granted to administrators for Degree Planner. If you do not have familiarity or need a refresher, the link is also a useful resource for you to explore before continuing with this article.
Knowledge Base: Degree Planner for Students
How to access Degree Planner
Within Starfish, you will need to find the student you want to view/build a plan for. You can use the search bar if you know at least one of: the student's first name, last name, email address, or ctcLink ID number.
You can also browse for students. Use the Students view in Starfish, found from the side menu.
This will bring you to the My Students tab.
Where you can use filters to narrow down the search and find a list of students meeting multiple criteria, including your connection to them.
Starfish also has advanced filters that use Degree Planner information, where you can filter on students who do/do not have plans, the status of plans or range of how close to completion a given plan is.
Once you have found the student you want to work with, you will find Degree plan using the Degree Planner tab on the student's account.
How does Degree Planner build plans?
Degree Planner uses a system called Priority Maps, which are a combination of:
- Our published catalog-based Planning Guides
- Formal/Informal degrees maps with ideal course order to obtain the degree in a timely fashion
- Prerequisite data from all required courses in a degree
- Predicted availability of required courses, using the last 5 years of historical course offerings
When using the Browse button when you start to build a plan, the list that is generated and the information in each degree listed are Degree Planner's interpretation of the Planning Guides.
When you go the Requirements tab in Degree Planner and sort by Priority, you will see the complete Priority Map for the degree, detailing which courses are designated to populate into plans first, considering their prerequisites and predicted availability.
The result should (largely) mirror the degree maps in the Courses tab.
Warnings
Starfish uses relationships to establish connections between staff and students.
This means that you will only ever have access to degree plans for students you have a connection to and in roles that should be able to see their degree plans. Depending on your role and the relationship you have with a student, you may have very limited access to view/build plans for some students. If you look up a student record and do not see the Degree Planner tab available, that means Starfish could not establish a connection between you and that student that allows for degree plan access. Inquire with a Starfish administrator if you believe that is in error.
Students can view plans you build.
Be careful about building too many plans or cluttering up Degree Planner, as students have full access to view every plan you build for them. As an administrator, you have the ability to delete plans, so be sure to delete plans that were experiments or trail runs from Degree Planner.
Only advisors can approve plans.
Anyone with administrative access will have the Approve button active in plans they build, however the only authorized body to approve plans are advisors. If your role is not advisor, you should not approve any plan that you have made or reviewed for a student. Have the student request approval instead.
Don't try to rewrite history.
It may be tempting, using advanced settings, to start plans when the student first enrolled in classes, even if that was several quarters ago. It can create plans that are pretty and clear to look at in the Courses tab - detailing all the classes they have taken over their time at the college as if they were part of the plan all along. But Degree Planner was not designed for this. It is a future-looking tool and can malfunction when you try to rewrite history and have plans start before the current or future quarters. All history is captured in the Requirements tab; the Courses tab is used to chart a path forward from today, fully considering the history, but not planning for it. If you try to, Degree Planner will assume that you have gone back in time and would like to chart a path forward from the new instance of time you are in, meaning it will try to have the student retroactively take required courses in the past, as long as the plan has room for it. Degree Planner works best if you let it plan starting today or at some future date. Don't use Degree Planner as a time machine, it just doesn't work very well.
Support Options
If you run into a problem using Degree Planner, use the link to file a ticket for support:
Starfish Support: Degree Planner Platform
You can also find more articles about Degree Planner and how to build plans using the link:
Knowledge Base: Degree Planner for Students