Thrive Priority Support Network

If you’re having trouble, you might get an email from an academic development specialist inviting you to meet to discuss strategies, skills, and resources to help you. Academic development specialists are experts in navigating university life and developing the learning and self-management strategies to help you have a successful and fulfilling post-secondary experience.

We compare your academic performance in the current term to your historical GPA. We look for drops in grades that aren’t normal for you based on your past performance. For new students in their first semester, we don’t have a historical GPA so we look for patterns of failing grades.

Professors can also submit a confidential request, letting us know that a student is having academic difficulties. Your instructors care about your success and may notice if you’re struggling.

We combine these sources of information to identify students who are most in need. Then we invite them in for a meeting with an academic development specialist.

You cannot opt out of the reporting system but it’s completely up to you whether you meet with us. If you receive an email from Thrive, you can respond and set up a meeting, you can say “no thanks,” or you can just ignore the email.

Your privacy is important to us, so information about the Thrive Priority Support Network doesn't go in your transcript or general student record - it’s stored separately. Only the Thrive administrator and the academic development specialist offering outreach are able to see a student's Thrive data.

Instructors submitting concerns can only see what they submit. They’ll never know what your grades are in other classes, if other instructors submitted concerns, or if you decided to meet with an academic development specialist.

The purpose of the program is to connect students who may be in need of academic or personal support to the range of resources available on campus. All student information communicated through the Thrive Priority Support Network is collected under the authority of the Post-Secondary Learning Act. This information is treated confidentially and is used with the goal of supporting the student's success in the course.

Information generated by the system to determine who might benefit from the program is only used to identify students for outreach and to measure the success of the program. The information is stored separately from a student’s general academic record and confidentially destroyed when it's no longer needed. Aggregate data about student engagement with the Thrive Priority Support Network will also be used in order to enhance the current model of support.