Ball State Achievements NYT mention
Ball State Achievements is currently my primary project. I've been quiet about it as my extraordinary Emerging Tech team built out the apps and related material (we did a full beta test in Fall 2013). But, Achievements got a shout out from the New York Times, so I suppose it's public now.
Ball State Achievements is primarily a collaboration between IT and Student Affairs funded in part by NGLC as part of the Breakthrough Models Incubator. The project is aimed at positively influencing student behaviors to improve specific outcomes around retention and persistence. Personally, my goal has been to create a way to better quantify the parts of student life outside of the classroom that can impact classroom success as well as justify the classic "college experience" that everyone talks about as being important.
It'll be a few years until we truly know if we've made a positive impact on student outcomes. Achievements is currently a small data project with big data dreams. Until then, Gunnar, Ryan, Scott, and the Digital Corps students have built an awesome app with innovative features. We'll see what happens as our user base grows and millennials expectations of higher ed inspire (force?) changes.
