💡 Overview

Early alerts and interventions enable institutions to identify students showing early signs of academic difficulty, like missed classes, falling grades, and proactively connect them with targeted support. Element451's AI-powered Bolt Agents can automate interventions and streamline the process, reducing dropout risks and enhancing student success.

The Challenge: Many institutions notice student struggles too late and often rely on manual faculty-initiated flag raises, resulting in less effective and less timely interventions.
The Opportunity: Early and automated identification significantly increases the effectiveness of interventions.
The Impact: A proactive approach can boost retention by 2–7 percentage points per term and improve course success rates by 3–10%.

✅ Pre-Requisites

Before implementing alerts (traditional or with Element451):

Data Sources & Systems

Access to grades, attendance, and LMS and/or SIS data

Advising Resources

Clearly defined advising responsibilities
Available advising staff with capacity for proactive interventions

Intervention Framework

Established guidelines for responding to alerts
Defined referral paths for academic support services (tutoring, counseling, etc.)

🎯 Goals + Metrics

Retention: Improve term-to-term persistence by up to 7 points.
Success Rates: Boost course outcomes with targeted support.
Coverage: Ensure every alert gets a follow-up—no one slips through.
Speed: Route students to advisors and other support instantly when it matters most.
Impact: Achieve measurable gains in both retention and achievement.

Metric	Traditional Reality	With Element451	Why It Matters
Term-to-Term Retention	Baseline varies; often flat	~2–7% lift	Moves the needle on institutional goals
Course Success	C-or-better rates stall in the low 70s	~3–10 % gain	Drives academic achievement
Alert Coverage	Many alerts slip through or don't get raised at all	~100% coverage with LMS integration and calculated segments	Ensures every student gets attention
Time to Intervention	Usually measured in days or weeks	Instant, around-the-clock support	Speed is critical to success.

🏛 Traditional Workflow

Most institutions approach early alert and intervention through a systematic process that combines data monitoring with reactive advising outreach. While this comprehensive approach enables personalized student support and has proven effective in improving retention outcomes, it requires continuous coordination across multiple systems and significant advisor time investment to maintain consistent implementation.

The Standard Process

Academic Risk Monitoring

Advisors regularly review student performance data from student information systems, learning management systems, and faculty feedback to identify risk indicators. Key metrics include grade trends, course attendance patterns, assignment completion rates, and LMS engagement levels, typically compiled through weekly or bi-weekly reporting cycles.

Challenge: Data often exists across separate systems requiring manual compilation, and reporting cycles can delay risk identification by several days to a week.

Early Warning Sign Identification

Staff analyze compiled data to spot specific risk patterns such as declining academic performance, excessive absences, missing assignments, or reduced course engagement. This analysis helps differentiate between isolated issues and concerning trends that warrant intervention.

Challenge: Manual pattern recognition is time-intensive and may miss subtle warning signs or the compound effect of multiple risk factors, especially with high advisor caseloads.

Student Outreach

When students are flagged as at-risk, advisors initiate contact through email, phone, or text messaging to schedule intervention meetings. This "intrusive advising" approach aims to reach students before issues escalate, using supportive messaging that encourages help-seeking rather than defensive responses.

Challenge: The time lag between risk identification and initial contact can extend 24-48 hours or longer, while advisor capacity constraints may limit outreach volume during peak periods.

Targeted Intervention Implementation

Advisors conduct one-on-one meetings to understand root causes and collaboratively develop support plans. Common interventions include academic support referrals (tutoring, writing centers), study skills coaching, faculty engagement facilitation, and academic planning adjustments such as course load modifications.

Challenge: Intervention effectiveness depends heavily on student follow-through and the advisor's ability to coordinate warm handoffs to support services, often tracked through separate systems.

Progress Monitoring and Follow-Up

Advisors schedule regular check-ins to assess intervention effectiveness, monitoring improvements in attendance, grades, and assignment completion. Progress tracking helps determine when to modify strategies, escalate support, or transition students off active monitoring lists.

Challenge: Follow-up scheduling and progress data compilation require significant manual effort, and busy advisors may experience difficulty maintaining consistent check-in cycles.

Outcome Evaluation and System Refinement

Institutions track intervention success rates, analyze which strategies prove most effective, and refine risk identification criteria based on outcomes. Students demonstrating sustained improvement graduate from active monitoring, while persistent challenges may trigger more intensive support referrals.

Challenge: Comprehensive outcome analysis requires data compilation across multiple platforms, making it difficult to establish clear ROI metrics or optimize intervention thresholds efficiently.

Where Traditional Processes Struggle

Multi-System Coordination: Success requires seamless data flow between SIS, LMS, advising platforms, and support service systems, each with different update cycles and access protocols.
Scalability Constraints: Manual monitoring and outreach processes become increasingly challenging as student populations grow and advisor caseloads expand, particularly at community colleges.
Timing Sensitivity: The effectiveness of early intervention depends on rapid identification and response, but manual processes often introduce delays that can diminish impact.
Documentation Continuity: Intervention plans and progress notes may exist across multiple systems, making it difficult for support teams to maintain comprehensive student histories.

While this traditional approach demonstrates institutional commitment to student success and enables meaningful advisor-student relationships, many institutions seek solutions that maintain the personal touch while improving response times and enabling more sophisticated risk prediction and intervention coordination.

🤖 Element451 Workflow

With Element451, alerts become intelligent, automated, and proactive. Bolt Agents monitor key indicators like grades and attendance, instantly flagging concerns and routing students to advisors without delay. The result? Faster interventions, 100% follow-up coverage, and measurable gains in retention and success.

Step 1: Integrate Student Data

Sync SIS and LMS data automatically into Element451.
Real-time visibility into student performance metrics.

Step 2: Create Segments

Configure segments based on risk criteria
(e.g., Grade < 2.0 and/or no LMS logins in 7 days)

✨ Pro Tip: Make the segment calculated so that additional students will be added to the segment automatically, and use the “joined segment” trigger in your Bolt Job to automatically enroll future students.

Step 3: Onboard Academic Advisor Agent

Create a Bolt Academic Advisor Agent (or use one you've previously configured) to use in Bolt Jobs to proactively reach out to students and be available 24/7.

✨ Pro Tip: Use the Bolt Agent Creator Agent.

Step 4: Create Bolt Agent Job

Create a Bolt Agent Job assigned to the Agent created in Step 3.
Enroll the Segment from Step 2.
- If you configured this as a calculated segment, consider adding the “joined segment” trigger in addition to loading this segment.
The selected goal for your Bolt Agent Job may vary depending on your institutional procedures and organization structure. Here are two examples to consider:
- If your advising and/or tutoring services are leveraging Element451 appointment, use the goal “schedule appointment” with the action “schedule appointment” to urge the student to schedule an advising and/or tutoring appointment.
- Using the goal Inform/Notify goal along with the "provide information" actions to share support services such as tutoring, one-on-one advising, and other interventions.
The Agent will proactively contact students via personalized messages and automatically schedule advising sessions and/or refer to support resources.

Sample Job Instructions

You are reaching out to students with declining grades. Offer immediate tutoring support and schedule advising appointments.
You are contacting students missing multiple classes or haven't logged into the LMS in more than 10 days. Provide resources for academic coaching and mental health support.
You are contacting students who have low mid-term grades below a 2.0 in one or more classes. Reach out via SMS and Phone on the first communication. Be sure communications are clear and empathetic.
For the SMS, you can be more direct and offer tutoring services.
For the Phone call, begin by asking open-ended questions about their academic experience, such as “How are you feeling about your courses this semester?”
You can offer tutoring services, but you could also offer other campus resources that might help with other issues they raised.

Step 5: Conduct Proactive Advising Sessions

Once the student has booked an advising appointment, Advisors can utilize the Appointment Prep Agent to gather student context prior to meetings.
Conduct personalized advising meetings informed by real-time data.

Step 6: Implement Targeted Interventions

Advisors coordinate tailored support (tutoring, workshops, faculty meetings).
Document interventions directly in Element451.

Step 7: Monitor Progress & Adjust

Regularly review progress indicators (grades, attendance, assignments).
Adjust strategies and interventions dynamically based on student response.

🏆 What Success Looks Like

After 1 Week

Traditional: Advisors just beginning manual review.
Element451: 100% alerts triggered automatically, immediate outreach.

After 1 Month

Traditional: Limited and delayed interventions, reactive follow-ups.
Element451: Measurable improvement in retention and course success rates, real-time visibility into intervention effectiveness.

View Sample Agent Outreach

Subject: 
Support and Resources to Help You Succeed at Element University

Body: 
Hi Alma,

We want to make sure you have all the support you need as you continue your studies in Radiography at Element University. We offer a variety of academic support resources designed to help you succeed, including:

Tutoring: Personalized help from expert tutors in Radiography.

Study Workshops: Interactive sessions to improve your study skills and strategies.

Online Tools: Access to digital resources that can assist with your coursework and exam preparation.

We encourage you to schedule a tutoring appointment early [link] to get the most out of these resources. If you have any questions or need assistance with scheduling, please don't hesitate to reach out.

We're here to support you every step of the way!

Best regards,

Kai

AI Academic Advisor
Element University

Final Thoughts + Next Steps

📋 Key Considerations

Compliance & Ethics
- Ensure opt-out and privacy mechanisms are transparent.
Change Management
- Pilot with smaller groups before full rollout.
- Regularly communicate successes to maintain institutional buy-in.

🚀 Tips for Getting Started

Pilot Approach: Begin with high-risk cohorts (first-year students, first-gen, probationary students).
Measure Baseline: Track current intervention effectiveness and retention metrics.
Set Targets: Aim for immediate improvement in response times and student outcomes.
Scale Success: Broaden to the full student body based on pilot success.