Public Message to Invite Stakeholders

I wanted to let you know we initiated an important workgroup inPESC (Postsecondary Exchange Standards Council) covering academic progress. I clipped and pasted the charter for you below. Our next conference call will be March 27, 2009 at 3:30PM EST and we are meeting at the Sixth Annual Conference on Technology and Standards on April 5-7th in DC (www.pesc.org). We will hold several workshops at the Summit on the business case, user stories and potential priorities. I hope you can help get the word out.

Given the nature of our work, we have all had a conversation or two around improving college degree completion, academic progress and the general need for interoperability across educational institutions to states to corporations to government systems. We so often use the term transparency in our discussion. To me, it means a learner, no matter where they are enrolled or not, can be supported with guidance and nurturing that transcends the borders and policies that are designed institutionally or within a state. 

Academic progress must be considered in a far different light, when one recognizes the challenges of mobility, online learning, academic credit portability, acceptability and articulation when learning spans traditional and non-traditional providers from community colleges, corporate universities or experiential learning to universities providing study abroad or distant learning. This is not all encompassing list. 

How can we make national and state progress toward degree production if we can’t measure and assess where a learner is in their path to a degree and we can’t help guide them through the gateways they enter and exit? The guidance has to be personal. And, resources need to be aligned to foster the conversation and representation to augment the data systems that support the stakeholders. Without such a conversation, we will continue to develop isolated systems and services that will challenge us all or force us to repeat very expensive efforts.

I truly believe, we need to emphasis a plan (or in this case a community developed specification and conversation) that would guide the stakeholders and players in moving toward common means of transcending discrete and isolated systems by utilizing a common set of advertised automated services. If we were an industry run like Walmart (or for that matter, any other consumer oriented organization), our degree production would be predictably more optimized. Yet, we don’t have that governance and I am not suggesting or lobbying for change. In the optimum and ideal state though, we would organize the touch points across organizations and standardize how data is exchanged and then consumed to facilitate academic progress and all its functions and users.

Gaps exist in assessing, tracking and reporting academic progress. They also exist in advising, counseling and linking learners to resources spanning organizations. Today, only 8% of institutions can deliver and consume an electronic transcript. Less than that can deliver an academic progress report for prospective students prior to enrolling, considering their military, industry or prior sponsored learning. The effort under way to develop a plan or specification, will create a dictionary of terms, an outline of processes that need data exchange, a set of events that reflect the actions of a learner interacting with the stakeholders. 

Please pass on the word. We need to grow our group of stakeholders and interested organizations who can help us do this good work. The next conference call is scheduled for March 27, 2009 at 3:30PM EST