First, let me say the new advising tab and notification system are a great improvement and have proven to be helpful already. This is not a criticism of that feature but some suggestions on how we would find it more useful now that we've utilized since August.
1. Give direct access to the degree audit from the advised student page. We can see flags, transfer work and transcript of work completed but being able to access the degree audit without having to go through multiple steps to get there would be great.
2. Give someone the ability to deactivate system flags. In order to make prerequisites work for us we put placement testing results into a "course". Since the only assignment in the course is a placement test, students who do poorly have a flag that doesn't ever go away. If the academic admin, registrar or possibly some other role had the ability to turn off system flags it would remove a lot of extraneous flags for us.
3. Give the ability for the academic admin to turn off some parameters for flags that are not used or desired. We have found the lowest assignment grade to be not very useful. I changed the settings so that flags only happen for a 0 but teachers will record zeros if the student hasn't turned in an assignment and later input the grade when the assignment is submitted. We get a lot of flags that we don't need to follow up on. Other institutions may not need the attendance flags if they don't have an attendance policy.
4. On the overview page for the advisor show the degree or the degree abbreviation instead of the program (undergraduate/graduate). Degree has more impact on advising than program in my opinion and it would helpful to see that when trying to determine, for example, who to contact on your advisor list for certain events. I realize it's on the advised student's page but since we are small we have advisors who sometimes have to handle multiple programs in advising and this would allow them to more quickly identify groups.
5. Include anticipated graduation date on the advised student's page. (or on the overview page even - again helps to quickly identify groups who may need special contact).
Again, thanks for implementing this. I think its a great addition. Our advisors have been contacting students based on the flags and students have expressed appreciation for the advisor's interest.
