The Student Success Technologies (SST) team under UCI’s Office of Informational Technologies (OIT) has launched UCI Spark — a data-driven, personalized student dashboard — as part of an ongoing effort to raise awareness of campus resources. The pilot application was released on Jan. 22 and is available to all UCI students for the winter 2025 academic quarter.
The online application creates a customized interface that highlights campus resources in accordance with each user’s unique needs. Spark utilizes student data derived from Canvas and the school registrar to create personalized recommendations known as “sparks” that refresh weekly. Through the Spark dashboard, students are connected to campus resources and organizations — such as the Writing Center, ASUCI or the Student Wellness Center — that are beneficial to their present academic or social circumstances.
“One of the key pieces [of Spark] is it’s data-driven, so for the first time we’re taking a lot of institutional data and using that to make a tailored experience for the students who are using it,” SST Assistant Director and Spark Project Lead Jeremy Thacker told New University. “[Spark] provides specific opportunities and resources from all around campus that students hopefully can leverage in order to be more successful, and then it provides them with data … that they can use to then [be informed] how they can be more successful in those spaces.”
According to Thacker, development for Spark started in October 2023, although the vision had existed for years. This is largely due to the technological limitations that existed at the time, with OIT only recently obtaining the resources needed to effectively run the platform.
“One of the things that really makes Spark possible is our integration with data that we’ve been able to pull out of the Unison data platform, which is a consortium of various campuses,” SST Manager Mike Walton told New University. “They were the group that powers Spark in a format that we could work with easily, that actually saved us a lot of development time … This was a chance for us to try out a lot of new things and see how well we could make everything work.”
In creating UCI Spark, promoting student success remained at the forefront of the development team’s concern, according to SST Applications Programmer and UCI alumni Justin Camacho.
“As I’m working on Spark I’m thinking back to my own student experience and how this tool would have been helpful for me,” Camacho said. “There are certain resources, such as the Basic Needs Hub, that I didn’t even know about when I was a student, but I have since learned about from Spark.”
Camacho added that receiving informative sparks or having the ability to browse the Spark library would have allowed him to see all the different things UCI offers, which he believes is the biggest perk of the tool.
SST is a relatively new team under the broader OIT that was founded in April 2022. The team primarily focuses on creating technological applications that promote the success of UCI’s students.
“This team was put together from people from around other places in OIT, and so this was our first big student-facing project,” Walton said. “It was really cool to see this group of people put their brains together and come out with this great project.”
Moving forward, the SST team hopes to continue development through student feedback and consistent application usage, according to Thacker.
“[What] we’re really trying to do is figure out what does success look like for [Spark],” Thacker said. “We want to empower students, help them reach their personal goals … We’re actively working, especially during this pilot year, to figure out what’s the right balance and continue to tweak the tool to meet that balance.”
Skyller Liu is a Features Intern for the winter 2025 quarter. He can be reached at skyllerl@uci.edu.
Edited by Kaelyn Kwon.