****Note: Prism has released CohortTracker™.
Go here to get up-to-date information or view our introductory screen cast.****
As discussed in a recent post, Decision Mechanics are working with Prism Decision Systems to design cohort tracker, an early warning system for identifying high school students at risk of dropping out. The project demonstrates how an agile development approach can – in a matter of weeks, not years – deliver focused, actionable, real-time information to educational decision-makers at all levels.
Agile development
- Is characterized by low-cost, rapid delivery of simple, useful, sustainable software that is frequently updated to incorporate user feedback.
- Produces applications that are lightweight, solve a single, urgent problem, and are not burdened by unnecessary features or complexity.
Drop-out prevention is only one of a number of problems that could be tackled using the same approach.
Successful application of agile practices within school systems depends, in part, on the availability of high quality data. As part of the development process, the team designed CohortML. CohortML provides a formal, general description of school cohorts, allowing numerous systems to be built on top of a single, well-defined data set and the potential for sharing applications across districts and/or states.
The cohort tracker web application was developing using ASP.NET MVC 3 and SQL Server 2008 R2.
For more information, contact Sean Brady.
- This post was written by Prism’s Chief Technology Officer, Andrew Tait, Decision Mechanics Limited