Innovating Together: An inside look at GVSU’s inaugural Technology Summit

Her keynote focused not on lofty technological concepts, but on a personal story of how small data points made a profound impact on a GVSU student's well-being, reinforcing the everyday ways that data, when paired with personal insights, can form meaningful change through action.

Luttenton-Knoll explained that through Blackboard, the program students use to access course content, faculty can see data on students' platform use: how many times they've clicked into course content, assignments they've missed, overall time on the platform and more.

She recalled a time she saw a sudden drop in engagement from one student in particular on Blackboard's activity scatter plot, representing a strong deviation from the student's normal behavior. "It was my insight that said, there's got to be something deeper going on here," she recalled.

She reached out once via email, as per her typical process, with no response. So, she reached out again. "My second message was to the effect of, 'This is the trend I've seen in you, and I'm worried. I don't see anything that would be hindering you from doing the good work you had been doing. Do you need help? Are you OK?' And I left it at that."

Luttenton-Knoll did end up receiving a response from the student, indicating that the student was experiencing a severe mental health crisis and had not been going to any classes. "I had never received an email like this from a student," she recalled. "What I can tell you is that that email carried the weight of a student who was in an immediate crisis and needed help."

Luttenton-Knoll took action, filing a CARE (Campus Assessment, Response, and Evaluation) report and connecting with the Counseling Center . "In less than an hour, we had a network for this student," she said. "They had the team they needed to handle this crisis. The data, analytics, insight and actions had created a lifeline for this student who may not have had one otherwise."