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

Student, Course and Degree Audit Information Systems

There are many systems and developers deployed throughout higher education. As stakeholders in academic progress, we hope to recruit participants from many of the vendors and developers, even home grown systems to participate in our work group.

Reference AACRAO SIS/Degree Audit Survey

SIS vendors and systems:
Academic Edge Student System
Agresso
Campus Management
Datatel
iNet Solutions
Inttelix Software
Jenzabar CX, EX
Oracle/PeopleSoft
Peterson Software
Populi College Management System
Scan Business Systems - CampusCafe
SAP Higher Education
SunGard Higher Education, Banner, PowerCampus, Plus
Three Rivers

Learning management systems, course management systems
Blackboard
Moodle
DesireToLearn

Portfolio systems
rSmart
Nuventive
LiveText

Degree Audit/Advising
Decision Academic
redLantern/DARS
Degree Works
IronSoft

Retention
Starfish Solutions

Transcript Exchange
ConnectEDU
DocUFide
XAP
National Transcript Center
Script Safe

Catalog Production and Distribution
Smart Catalog
Digital Archtecture

Student Mobility Navigation
AcademyOne

Call on Friday March 6 3:30pm EST

Friday, March 6, The Academic Progress Workgroup (formerly Degree Audit) has re-organized under Co-Chairs David Moldoff of PESC member organization AcademyOne and Clare-Smith Larson of PESC member organization Iowa State University will be holding a conference call meeting from 3:30pm - 4:30pm EST. 

Conference Dial-in Number: (712) 775-7100
Participant Access Code: 726310#

If you've been interested in this effort or know of another organization that is, now is the best time to join this initiative. As a reminder...there is no limit to the number of representatives that can join a workgroup from a single PESC member organization but being a member is required for workgroup participation. 

For organizations looking to become a member, please contact Jennifer Kim, Membership Services Manager, at 202.261.6514. For more information go to the website athttp://academicprogress.blogspot.com/ and the home site atwww.pesc.org.

Resources

Shared Website
http://sites.google.com/site/academicprogress/

Glossary of Academic Progress

This is a Shared Glossary (Responsible Editor: To Be assigned)

A learner is a student who participates in formal programs of study offered by academic institutions or other providers of instruction. A leaner can include someone taking courses in traditional classroom or online format. Whether the learner is taking self paced or fixed attendance.

Academic Progress is the group of processes, defined by events, attributes of data, business rules, inputs and outputs that reflect the means to collect learning outcomes, assess their impact on program requirements and determine placement in further courses of study, toward meeting the objectives of the learner's path.

Academic Progress Charter

Work Group Name: Academic Progress

Work Group Chairs:
Mr. David K. Moldoff [DMoldoff@academyone.com]
Ms. Clare Smith-Larson [cssmith@iastate.edu]

Secretary:
Dr. Afshin Mikaili [AMikaili@kaplan.edu]

Scheduler:
To Be Assigned (Manage Academic Progress Calendar)

Founding Members:
AcademyOne
Iowa State University
Kaplan University

Description of Work: To Develop a Community Specification for Tracking and Assessing a Learner's Academic Progress through institutional programs of study

Background: Academic Progress is the group of processes, defined by events, attributes of data, business rules, inputs and outputs that reflect the means to collect learning outcomes, assess their impact on program requirements and determine placement in further courses of study, toward meeting the objectives of the learner's path. A learner is a student who participates in formal programs of study offered by academic institutions.

Areas of Focus:
- Framing the academic progress workflow discussion
- Outlining the functional areas, priorities
- US and Worldwide implications
- Building the case for a messaging architecture
- Identifying publishers and subscribers of data
- Recognizing authoritative sources, destinations and dependencies
- Developing a list of prospective message objects mapped
- List agnostic interfaces crossing applications inside and outside of an institution
- Developing an implementation framework
- Elements and validation, business rules
- Events, attributes of data
- Interface Points

Rationale: There are many reasons to focus on Academic Progress as a key topic for creating data exchange specifications. Here are three good reasons:

· First, learners are mobile, moving through many stages of learning, crossing boundaries both physical and logical, and creating data reflecting events, processes and outcomes that interact across many points and uses inside one institution and crossing into another.

· Second, is the challenge to streamline the interactions of users and application systems designed to serve a portion of users and uses, often resulting in duplication of effort, gaps in functions, and lack of open access to accurate data and broken chains of work flow.

· Third, is the need to make progress reporting and the measures easier for all constituents to utilize, as they interact.

References:
http://www.pesc.org/

Are you a stakeholder in Academic Progress?

“Innovation is not what innovators do; it’s what customers and clients adopt.” — Michael Schrage, MIT, Marketing Matters

Nikola Tesla, one of the most brilliant innovators of all time, had a vision for how electrical technologies could perform faster and more efficiently. Unfortunately for him, and for society, his technologies remained unused for decades or were used for the wrong business reasons. Tesla died virtually unknown to society. It took many years after his death for society to recognize his talents and scientific contribution acknowledged by his peers. One small testament to Tesla’s innovative contribution to the field of science is the use of his name, Tesla, as the unit of measurement of magnetic fields. It is a standard reflected by adoption. When in 1887 Tesla perfected the technology for the alternating current (AC) motor (previously electrical motors were based only on direct current (DC)), he was fascinated only with applying his genius to the technology and didn’t realize that he might have helped the world more by balancing his passion for technology with an equal passion for its business application.

What if Tesla properly identified the stakeholders who were aligned with his vision rather than the path he chose? What would have happened? What if he had ignored the short-term monetary gain for the long term view to align invention with processes, stakeholders and benefits? Maybe history might have turned out differently. This teaches us a lesson to focus on the users of technology, not just the creators of it. It also teaches us to focus on a long term vision, not just the monetary rewards from technology and innovation. Had Tesla envisioned the business activities or processes in which his technology would have created the biggest impact in the long term rather than focusing only on technological innovation and selling his patent to the highest bidder, his name, rather than Thomas Edison’s, would properly be associated with AC electricity. As a consequence of not thinking about the business or social applications of his innovations, Tesla’s technology was not applied to electrical generators for many years and the world was deprived of lower-cost electrical energy production. As a result of Tesla’s lack alignment or balance between technology and business, he was a spectator to, rather than the acknowledged inventor of, the biggest step forward in electrical energy generation: George Westinghouse’s introduction in 1895 of a version of the AC electrical engine in the hydroelectric station at Niagara Falls, which successfully transmitted electrical power over a distance of 25 miles to factories to Buffalo, NY. This event started a mini industrial revolution.

As a community based standards effort, we need to focus on the business aspects of a shared vision, guiding us step-by-step through the work of identifying the right stakeholders, the key measurements of success (key performance indicators), and the alignment of business processes to be improved by the technology by mapping them to business critical success factors. Academic Progress requires us finding the right stakeholders and making sure we focus our efforts on the right processes. Many may argue that technologists do not need to master the disciplines of business as well as science, yet history presents many examples of visionaries who have not done this and the world has not benefited as a result. Witness the difference between Tesla and Edison, or Galileo compared to Christopher Columbus, who received funding (rather than imprisonment) to send three ships on an expedition based on the same radical and innovative idea that the world was not flat. Columbus was successful in receiving funds not because he presented a scientific expedition to Queen Isabella of Spain, but because he aligned the value of his expedition with the most important goal of Queen Isabella:

Discovering faster trade routes so as to more easily gain gold and spices.

— W. Bernard Carlson, Scientific American, March 2005 “To ensure that your technology vision is applied, do what Columbus did: align your vision with the right stakeholders, the ones with equal vision and the means to accomplish them.”

Are you a stakeholder in Academic Progress? If we have anything to do with learners, student life cycle and the processes spanning advising, guidance, assessment and placement, you most certainly should consider joining on our work group. Together, we can develop a joint specification and reference model to foster interoperability in tools that support our long term vision, which is to help students and learners of all types achieve success. That may mean different things to different stakeholders from achieving a credential to completing a course.