Temple University’s Real-Time Feedback App Is the Latest Analytics Business Spinoff
With more universities than ever finding groundbreaking uses of data analytics, it’s not surprising that the latest higher education business spinoffs have been in the Big Data realm.
In 2016, University of Maryland University College’s data analytics initiative to improve retention was so successful, the institution spun it off into a separate consulting company called HelioCampus, which provides data platforms and analytics services to universities across the country.
However, the latest data analytics business venture out of Temple University seems poised to innovate more than just higher education.
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Fox School of Business App Reshapes HR Practices
Temple University’s Fox School of Business recently powered up its students and advisers with a data analytics program run on Microsoft Power BI. Using the data visualization software, Fox School of Business not only created a feedback dashboard to fuel a more holistic advising approach, it also created an app that can be leveraged by companies.
Temple faculty used their analytics experience to create DevelapMe, a real-time feedback app designed to revamp the performance review process, according to a Temple news release.
“Human resource executives are moving away from yearly reviews for a litany of reasons,” Tony Petrucci, academic director of leadership development at Fox School, said in the release. “They are oftentimes inefficient, time-consuming and frequently inaccurate. With DevelapMe, those moments can be tracked in real time to accurately assess a colleague or an employee, and demonstrate areas of strength or weakness.”
Like Temple’s student success system, DevelapMe captures feedback and uses a sliding scale for real-time grading of specific competencies that can be tailored to the company or institution using it.
To test the app, Petrucci and others on the team tapped Fox School of Business students. MBA students were given leadership responsibility over a team of freshmen for a six-week project. The MBA students used the app to deliver feedback and in turn gained valuable leadership experience using analytics, as well as hands-on human resource training.
“Over the project’s duration, more than 25,000 pieces of feedback and over 2,800 comments were logged,” the school stated in the release. “The data showed that 65 percent of the MBA students improved in their leadership behavior and 25 percent of undergraduate students improved in human capital skills, like high-performance conflict management, during the course of the project.”
The DevelapMe app is available in both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
