Wednesday, February 18, 2009

My Academic Plan Update

I haven't posted anything recently about our My Academic Plan (MAP) project and there is a lot going on. First of all, a quick overview. MAP went online at the end of April 2007 and it has been used by over 17,000 students to create roughly 38,000 academic plans. It was the result of a concerted effort of our counselors, some students and a couple of very talented developers - Pratik Modi and Shaun Collett. I have never worked with a design team that was more dedicated to seeing a project succeed as this group. It really is a privilege to work with them.

MAP was awarded a 2007 Focus Award from our state chancellor's office and they also gave us a small grant to explore the feasibility of turning MAP into a system that could support other colleges. We are in the midst of that feasibility study right now and are having conversations with several software companies to find one that would be a good partner with us. We are presenting MAP at a number of conferences and we are in conversations with several colleges who are interested in purchasing it.

I love this project because from the very beginning the focus was on the students. We came up with a very student-centered design and all of this exciting work going on around it remains secondary to the fact that our students are being served. Very cool.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey Jim - I've followed your RSS feed for sometime, and this posting synchronized with a recent project request of my own. Is there any way to learn more about this project? Long shot here, but are there any plans to share it within the educational community?

Jim Gaston said...

Brad:

You can read more about MAP at:
http://www.socccd.edu/map

Please note that the link to our demo server will not be working this week because we are doing maintenance work on the server infrastructure.

We are definitely interested in sharing MAP with a larger community - send me an email to my work address (jgaston@socccd.edu) and we can talk about it.

Unknown said...

I like the iPod downloadable video tutorials! :-)

I produced a Camtasia video of MAP for some of the senior officers here, but unfortunately I don't think they could imagine the potential I was trying to describe and illustrate for them. Too bad, but I have plenty else to keep me busy! I'm enjoying my VMWare hypervisors at the moment, and I am creating our "cloud" and buying a lot of new lab equipment. The last lab configuration I bought can be seen at http://www.infm.ulst.ac.uk/html/mg122.html.

Take care,

Ted