Built for Students, Not for Dashboards: Walden University's Co-Innovation Story

Most institutions have dashboards. Most institutions have predictive models. Most still struggle to translate insight into coordinated action — at the moment it matters most for students.

This session tells the story of what happens when a university refuses to accept that gap as inevitable. Walden University, one of the largest online universities in the US, partnered with Civitas Learning not as a vendor and client, but as co-innovators — rebuilding how predictive insights reach the advisors, faculty, and support teams who act on them every day.

The result: a student success ecosystem where predictions don't live in a separate dashboard. They live inside the tools teams already use — routing the right intervention to the right person at the right moment, before students disengage.

In conversation with Civitas Learning CEO Will Ballard, Walden's Matt Bubley will share how this partnership evolved from frustration to co-innovation, what it took to operationalize predictive support at scale, and what one year of results looks like — including a 350 basis point improvement in annual continuation rates.

Attendees will leave with a concrete framework for moving from prediction to coordinated action, and a candid look at what a true vendor partnership — one built around student outcomes — actually requires.