ONTRACK Plus is a free, nonprofit college-readiness platform that empowers first-generation and underserved high school students with the skills, resources, and scholarship pathways they need to navigate from high school to higher education with confidence.
Empowering first-generation students at scale.
ONTRACK Plus, powered by The Uncommon Individual Foundation, is a free collegereadiness platform built for first-generation and underserved high school students. With more than 30,000 students and educators across the country relying on the platform, the mission is clear: give every student the knowledge, tools, and confidence to plan their educational future. When ONTRACK Plus came to Marker Seven, the platform they had was no longer equal to that mission.
eLearning expertise & track record.
ONTRACK Plus needed a partner who had built learning platforms before, not one who would figure it out on their project. Marker Seven brings deep expertise in designing and building custom eLearning systems, and we understand what it takes to hold a student's attention, structure content for comprehension, and guide learners through a progression that meets defined learning objectives and goals. That experience is what brought us to the table.
Nikki Massey, Educator
Fayetteville State University Upward Bound
An LMS built for this audience.
Enterprise LMS platforms like Blackboard and Canvas are priced for institutions that can absorb the cost – licensing models that start in the thousands annually and scale per seat. For a nonprofit offering its platform entirely free to students and educators, that math doesn't work. Open source was the obvious answer: no licensing fees, no per-seat costs, no startup overhead.
We chose Drupal specifically because the depth of gamification integration ONTRACK Plus needed – points, badges, leaderboards, achievement systems woven into the learning experience – required a platform flexible enough to support it without compromise. Drupal gave us that foundation, and we built the rest on top of it.
Engagement that goes beyond completion.
Keeping students engaged on a voluntary learning platform requires more than good content. We implemented a gamification layer, points, badges, leaderboards, and achievement milestones, that makes progress visible and rewarding. The system reinforces learning behaviors, not just task completion. Students earn recognition for engagement and comprehension. That distinction matters when the goal is outcomes, not page views. When a student can see how far they have come and what they have earned, coming back is easier.
Minor data protection & compliance architecture.
Working with platforms that serve students under 18 requires a different level of care around data handling than most digital products. Marker Seven has accumulated years of experience navigating COPPA, FERPA, and institutional privacy requirements across education and adjacent work. We brought that experience directly to the ONTRACK Plus architecture.
Role-based access controls govern what educators can see about individual students. Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is handled with explicit attention to purpose limitation. These decisions were built into the architecture from the start. For an organization that asks families to trust it with student data, that foundation is not optional.
Nonprofit budget discipline & roadmap planning.
ONTRACK Plus funds its platform through philanthropic support and offers it entirely free to students and educators. That generosity has real limits, and those limits shaped our engagement. We structured the work around MoSCoW prioritization, separating what was essential in the current phase from what could wait, and built a phased roadmap that delivered visible value early while leaving room to iterate.
Roadmap reviews are built into our process, not treated as optional. When a new capability is proposed, we ask together whether it belongs now or later, and what it displaces if added. That discipline is how a nonprofit organization ends up with a platform that feels like it cost more than it did.
Growing the platform together.
Launching the platform was the starting point, not the finish line. Marker Seven works alongside ONTRACK Plus as an ongoing development partner, continuously planning, prioritizing, and building as the platform grows. As ONTRACK Plus expands into new schools and districts across the country, the platform evolves with them, new capabilities, deeper integrations, and refinements driven by real feedback from students and educators in the field. We bring the same institutional knowledge and platform depth to every phase, so each iteration builds on the last rather than starting from scratch.
What we delivered.
01. Custom LMS
Purpose-built learning management system designed for firstgeneration student audiences
02. Gamification
Points, badges, leaderboards, and achievement systems that drive sustained engagement
03. Privacy Architecture
COPPA and FERPA-aligned data handling, role-based access, and PII protection built into the platform
04. Roadmap Planning
MoSCoW-driven prioritization and phased delivery structured around a nonprofit budget
05. Ongoing Partnership
Continuous improvement, maintenance, and roadmap stewardship post-launch
