Ellucian Experience Idol Award Winners Announced

Ellucian is thrilled to announce the winners of the 2025 Ellucian Experience Idol and Partner Experience Award! This year, customers and partners were announced on the mainstage at Ellucian Live, the industry's premier global technology conference. The 2025 Ellucian Experience Idol competition builds on last year's success, showcasing best-in-class customer innovations using the Ellucian Platform and leveraging Ellucian Software as a Service (SaaS) technologies such as Experience, Data Connect, and Intelligent Processes. We also recognized innovative partner integrations with Ellucian Experience with solutions that enhance institutional efficiency and student engagement.

The Ellucian Experience Idol competition invited higher education institutions to customize the Ellucian Platform for today's students and staff. Judging focused on three categories: use case, persona-driven experience, and collaborative effort. Finalist institutions were voted on by peer institution leaders and presented on the mainstage at Ellucian Live 2025.

Winners received a $5,000 Student Experience Scholarship, an Ellucian Flex Plus Professional Services Package to support further innovation within Experience, and a four-hour session with the Ellucian User Experience Design Team.

The 2025 Ellucian Experience Idol winners and finalists include:

Best Use Case

Winner

Lethbridge Polytechnic: Students no longer want to carry around physical IDs. That's why Lethbridge Polytechnic created a digital ID as an Experience card. The digital ID enables the institution to cater to student needs by allowing them to use the Experience Companion App to gain access to the gym, library, and testing centers with a barcode rendered in real time. Faculty and staff then use a 2D scanner to grab student information and gain insights on how they're accessing various services at the institution. Admins then synch the usage data with their CRM to better understand student lifecycle trends.

Finalist

George Brown College: To comply with Canadian regulatory requirements, this institution created an Intelligent Processes workflow that asks students for their Social Insurance Number (SIN) and reports to administrators the number of students who have not met the requirement. Students click on a link to enter their SIN and have Banner’s Student Information System update the information directly. After submitting their information, they receive confirmation that the task is complete. George Brown also uses custom APIs to display personalized registration statuses within Experience cards.

Finalist

West Chester University: This innovation empowers newly admitted students to see their transfer courses articulated at the University and provides a clear picture of the courses that students earned credits. Within a sleek Experience dashboard, students have an informative view of their transfer credit summary that allows them to enter their student ID and quickly access a page with detailed information in a clean and elegantly designed table built in Experience. The page includes a summary of their information with the courses, term, grade and the number of credits received from the transferred institution. Admins receive a similarly intuitive view with the ability to quickly gain transparency to a student’s transfer history, allowing faculty and staff to more impactfully influence advising.

Best Persona-Driven Experience

Winner

Delta College: Delta recently relaunched an entirely new Experience dashboard, dubbed MyDelta, that has a chatbot embedded in an Experience card, in addition to dynamic content that leverages the software development kit (SDK) and Data Connect serverless APIs to create several useful cards. Examples include a Semester Countdown card showing various deadlines for the current semester, a Registration Status card to keep students updated on the courses and credits they're taking, and a My Grades card, which shows a student's cumulative GPA with links to the final grades and unofficial transcript. Delta College also featured a My Program card, which shares program details for a student's major and provides the ability to switch between the programs they're enrolled in and take actions such as changing the program or applying for graduation within the card.

Finalist

Westfield State University: The institution integrated the functionality between its Nestwork Events card and its campus map, which allows a student to find the correct building on an interactive campus map for upcoming events. The Nestwork Events card is a slideshow of upcoming events like sporting events, career fairs, and student group meet-ups so students can identify activities they may want to attend. Built using the Experience software development kit (SDK), students can see the name, date, time, and location of every event in addition to a relevant picture. Students can also search for a specific building in the Campus Map card to find its location on the map.

Finalist

Pasadena City College: The Speech Language Pathology Assistant (SLPA) Process Card allows functional users to clear many student IDs for restricted SLPA courses every semester. By leveraging Data Connect and custom APIs, the institution's IT department reduced the time it takes to complete the task from hours to under a minute. No longer reliant on technical support, the SLPA Process Card makes it easy for the program manager to efficiently manage the task on her own time with 100% accuracy.

Best Collaboration

Winner

University of Bridgeport and Goodwin University: The two institutions leveraged Data Connect to produce a bulk invoice upload process for their Accounts Payable department. This innovation saves countless hours, turning a previous manual process into one that takes minutes, allowing staff to focus on more strategic activities. Employees create a new job using Integration Packages in Data Connect, which allows them to use the information in their Colleague ERP.

Partner Experience Award

Winner

TouchNet: Its OneCard VIP Experience card seamlessly integrates physical and virtual campus IDs, allowing students and administrators to view balances, meal plans, transactions, and more within a single, user-friendly interface. This solution exemplifies the power of collaboration between technology providers and higher education institutions, delivering real-time access to essential campus services.

Congratulations to all our Ellucian Experience Idol winners and finalists!