Streamlining Transfer Articulation: The Role of Technology and the AACRAO SPEEDE Committee

In this episode of Transfer Tea, we explore how automation is transforming transfer articulation in higher education. Joined by members of the AACRAO SPEEDE Committee, we discuss technologies like OCR, XML, and EDI that are streamlining the management of student data and improving processes. Tune in to learn how these innovations are helping institutions enhance efficiency and better serve students.

Host:

Loida González Utley
Director of Recruitment and Enrollment Services
Texas A&M University- Central Texas
loida.gonzalez@tamuct.edu



Guests:

Patrick Sears
Registrar
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
psears@siue.edu



Matthew Bemis
Sr. Associate University Registrar
University of Southern California
wbemis@usc.edu



Doug Holmes
Manager, eTranscripts
Ontario Universities’ Application Centre
doug@ouac.on.ca



Resources:

AACRAO SPEEDE Committee: https://www.aacrao.org/people/aacrao-speede-committee

SPEEDE: https://www.speedeserver.org/

Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council (PESC): https://pesc.org/


FMI: www.aacrao.org


Email Transfer Tea at transfertea@aacaro.org

Transcript

0:13

You are listening to Transferte, a podcast for the Aggro community sponsored by Agro, the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. I am your host, Loya. Welcome to today's episode. In this episode, we're diving into the world of automating transfer articulation processes and how institutions of higher education are leveraging technology to streamline these efforts. With the growing demand for more efficient ways to manage student data, automation and transfer articulation has become a key area of focus. To help colleges and universities explore the potential of these technologies. The Acro Speedy Committee is actively exploring ways to support institutions and navigating these opportunities. We're excited to have some members of the Agro Speedy Committee on the show today to discuss how technology such as optical character recognition, also known as OCR XML, EDI, and other innovative methods are transforming the way student information is handled. These tools can help automate the reading of electronic files as well as extract and process data from PDFs, ultimately making it easier for institutions to manage transfer articulation within their student information systems. Stay tuned as we explore how these technologies work, the challenges colleges and universities face, and the way in which the Acro Speedy Committee is playing a pivotal role in supporting schools to adopt and implement these automation solutions. It is an exciting day today as we have some very special guests on Transee. They are part of this really neat group of professionals called the Acro Speedy Committee, and if you do not know who they are and what they do, don't worry, this episode is gonna help clarify all of that. Um, but first, I would like to give them some time to introduce themselves, gentlemen. Hi, I'm Patrick Sears. Uh, I'm the registrar at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Um, I've been on the Speedy committee for about 3 years and, uh, currently serving as chair of the Speedy Committee. Uh, we'll go in the order of, uh, length of service here. Um, so I'm the 2nd in length of service. Matt Bemis, I'm, uh, with the University of Southern California. In my daytime job, I manage all things for the degree progress department. Uh, and a big part of that is, uh, electronic data, electronic data exchange. Uh, I've been with the Speedy Committee since mid 2010 and have been an active member since that time and, uh, have been promoting the, uh, the mission of the Speedy Committee which is to foster the adoption of electronic transcript exchange through education and outreach. Uh, you'll, you, you will, you will have seen us in many acro, uh, regional and annual meetings throughout the years. Um, we, uh, we traditionally are not only are our committee members active but we are expected to participate and attend in regional and national conferences and. And uh while some of our committee members may not have yet implemented, the reason we are all on this committee is because we believe in the adoption of electronic data exchange machine to machine data exchange is what we're here to talk about today, uh, and how that will change your life if you. If you engage this, you, you will, this will, this will knock your socks off. You consider leaving your husband you consider leaving your wife. That's how transformative this will be if you buy into what we're selling here and truly anybody who's using this technology now will tell you they will never go back. It's so efficient. It's so effective and ultimately it improves the student experience tenfold, and that's what we're here to convince you and get you to the same place that some of us are today on the committee. Great, thanks, Ma. I'll see if I can follow that. Uh, my name is Doug Holmes. Hi everyone. I'm the manager of e-transcripts at the Ontario University's Application Center, Ontario, Canada. Um, so I'm the, the oldest serving member, I guess, on Speedy that's on our call. I've been involved with Speedy since 1998. Um, doing electronic data exchange since 1995 or so, um, in my day job, and so I work at an application processing center, admission application processing center for all the universities in Ontario, and we do data exchange as our day to day business. It's about exchanging applications and test scores and transcripts both college and high school, um, and across Canada we increase the traffic and flow of data and increasingly. PDF, we receive a lot of documents from schools around the world, but definitely we know through the standards we're talking about today which are North American based standards, schools in Canada and the US are using the same standard, and I think that's the part that excites me about the data exchange that that Speedy promotes is about standardized exchange because we definitely can create a file in Excel or in a text file and exchange between a couple of. Partners, but to scale that up with hundreds and potentially thousands of trading partners, when you include high schools, you can definitely have thousands, um, to be able to scale that up really well, standards help you help your IT department be able to program the coding around what to do with these files and not have to interpret from 500 different partners, um, separately in different ways and different file formats and so on. Um, so we're all about the standards and those standards have been well road tested. Um, the original EDI or sort of text file standard has been around since the early 90s. Uh, the, the XML file that most of our schools in Canada are using that are doing this have been around since the early 2000s. Um and then there are newer standards that are coming and PDF is in there as well that can exchange various documents that you may be able to get data out of with OCR and ICR, different technologies to extract that into into data for you. So like you, you can see the breath of knowledge here, right? You know, you have somebody that's very novice myself and all the way up to uh individuals that's been around since 1998 and you know, the Speedy committee is made up of, of other other individuals. Um we have about 10 to 12 active members. Um, and it is a pack of acro, um, so, you know, we, we come together and we're trying to advocate towards the EDI XML just this data exchange between institutions, not only uh US domestic, but you know, having Doug's expertise uh from our neighbors to the north in Canada that, that's a huge, it brings in more of the international population as well, so. Well, Matt mentioned life changing, and I think that we, we're all about life changing and we're all about transforming the student experience, right, regardless of, uh, where we, um, where we are located in our institutions, um, we do have listeners in admissions recruitment, we have IT people, register people, but all in all we want to transform the student experience. We want to elevate that, um. But you know, we talk a lot about data, we talk a lot about technology, um, there are some institutions that have that don't have this data in this technology and you know right now with the advancing AI features and how quickly technology is changing, this may be kind of daunting. So what can we do to support what are your, what are your thoughts on that, on institutions that may be hesitant to adopt new technology? I think at least from my perspective, especially since I've been on Speedy, one of the reasons why I wanted to join Speedy was because it is daunting. It is, it is unknown and I come up from a, a background in IT and, and then have served in the registrar's office for over 18 years and um it's one of those things that It's a process that we, my institution SIUE could be doing, uh, and utilizing, um, but how do you start? And for me, my, my outreach was I came across Acro and, and, um, being involved with Acro and I saw Speedy and so that's why I reached out to the committee and, and got on. And it, it is, there is a lot and you can go down uh um some rabbit holes, I guess. Um, and you just have to, you have to take that first step and you have to start investing some time and, and understanding the process. It's been around for a long time. One of the first things I learned, uh, coming on the Speedy committee was, yeah, I was thinking about like XML and, and, um, some of this data exchange that was coming, was being talked about it like an acro annual and. And um Some of the vendors were just starting to come out a few years ago with, with uh this idea, um, and I stepped into the Speedy and they they start educating me like, yeah, this is something that's been around. EDI has been around, banks, banks been using EDI technology for, for decades now. So, you know, it's kind of, it's, it's a, it's a solution for institutions that has been um tested and, and utilized not just for our industry but other industries. Um, and it's making that step forward and sometimes that becomes difficult for people, um, especially change is scary, but I think with having a resource like Speedy and having, um, individuals that we can reach out to, it, it kind of helps you and, uh, everybody has their little nuances, everybody has their own, uh, SIS and You know, it's just one of those things that, that's, we all come from different backgrounds. I'm a banner school, there's PeopleSoft schools, there's work, uh workday schools, you know, and so we all have a little bit different twist on how you can implement it. um, and like Doug was mentioning, he, he, they, you know, he uses EDI and XML, so, you know, you get that. Uh, piece of the puzzle too. So we're, we're a good resource and you know, it's one of those things that we're, we're trying to um Kind of just get the word out and try to help, help those uh individuals in our roles, in our industry to, to make that first step forward and then the next step and the next step and, you know, evangelize this, this idea. And I think, I think Patrick, you're alluding to some of the good questions for folks that are trying to start this. Where to start is asking good questions and, and don't be afraid to ask any questions, Speedy, so we, we like to say we're your 12 new best friends if you want to do electronic data exchange, we're here, we're volunteers who are passionate about this, and we serve, uh, the acro community, um, and we're here to help wherever we can. We may already know the answer to help or we'll try to connect you with folks who do. Um, and some of those questions that you can ask to get started, uh, Patrick mentioned some of the different systems that we're using. We may know folks who are doing what you're trying to do that have the same system or similar. Um, we know a lot of the vendors, um, in the SIS space and in the admissions, um, the CRM space, different tools that may be out there that you may already have on your campus that have pieces of this available that you just might need to configure and then we can help you do testing and kind of walk along the path with you. So I think that's. The place to start is asking some questions to find out what you're trying to do, what, what are you trying to accomplish? Is it really the records office that's initiating this? Is it, uh, the transfer area specifically you're increasing your transfer students or reverse transfer? Um, is it the admissions office that's just inundated with paper and PDF still trying to get a handle on the volume and asking some of those questions about what you want to accomplish and then what systems you may have that already can do some of this automated work for you and the machine readable data that Matt mentioned to. To try to help the efficiency and automate those processes to free up your staff to do the other things that they need to do as part of that process, the judgment calls, the advising, the interacting with students and so on. And, and if I could just um dovetail all that together, I really think that the, the real mission of Speedy. I Is, is the from the introduction to the indoctrination of this topic because I can't tell you over the years how many people I bumped into even vendors. Cold Source is a premier vendor in this space in higher education. They helped us understand self-reporting data through the use of EDI and they had no idea what EDI was. Now CoSource doesn't know what EDI is, come on. So, so, but you know we're really looking at we are about introducing to the. Academic community success stories and what I will tell you is anytime we've had a state initiative call or we've had a group of people we've got on a call and we have the folks who have been using this uh through you know years or or decades. Everybody on that call agrees, of course we would be doing of course everybody should be doing this if we all exchange data electronically, what a wonderful world it would be, right? St service would be that said I just sent my transcript and we would say, yep, we got it a minute ago and your transcript credit report is ready a minute ago. That is the speed of light. That can be accomplished with this and that really is our goal to say how can we do this and we do this through use cases um and I just wanna I I wanna just put the framework here for schools wanting to get started because a school that wants to get started, it can be as simple as pairing up with one of the speedy committee members who is actively sending. XML or EDI and understanding the receipt of that data and how that data will be mapped into their student information system. Most importantly you need to understand these standards are platform agnostic. It doesn't matter if you're on a banner of PeopleSoft. It doesn't matter if you're on, on, on Google spreadsheets. I mean literally this will work for you and so we're really trying to get that notion of how can we help you and that is the immediate outreach to the speedy committee to um folks in the community to saying we can help you because when you look at course level information as an example. What are you really looking at? You're looking at writing back to your student information system, the term the course was taken, the idea of the course, the title of the course, the units of the course, and the grades of the course. That is the minimum requirement and I think all of us would understand mapping those five data elements is really pretty easy. And by the way, um, at USC when we started this, that is the exact approach we took. Let's find someone who's willing to send us something and let's see how we can map it and within a week we had those 5 data elements mapped and we were, we were receiving, we were receiving data and writing data to our degree audit platform transfer credit um systems. Now there's a lot to that that goes into that but the initial the initial connection so we really try to sell the return on investment. And so, in, in the last few years, what I've found that you mentioned the fear of technology. That is not what we see at all. When we get into these groups and we talk about implementing what we see is there's a genuine fear of success. What are you gonna do when you're successful? Because the moment you're with a statewide institution or statewide initiative rather and you realize you have 5 people across your institutions who will no longer be keying data to end and you need to figure out how you're gonna repurpose those positions. The immediate response is it's a knee jerk response. Wait a minute, we didn't really understand that we're gonna rethink this. Because the notion is what in the world happens if the speedy server fails? Are these standards no no longer become reliable? Well, I'm here to tell you the folks that are in the pool now will continue to make sure those standards are operational and they continue to develop. Because when you engage this technology, what you realize is it literally is you're getting 1000 records coming in overnight on a server and loading and processing and the only ones you have to really look at are those that are outliers, those that have data that you haven't seen before if you're processing prior degree verification from a third party vendor as an example. Um, what happens when you have degrees that you haven't recognized, you have those, um, exceptions of sorts, but, but by and large what you realize looking at what people have done is of course everyone should be doing this, of course, and what is the cost, but what we see is the the one of the primary drivers of not committing to this. Is the repurposing of resources with the notion of what are we gonna do if it fails down the road. We can't get those resources back. And so, in my experience, that's been the, the biggest hurdle we have found to implementation, the fear of success and how do we get past that? I was gonna ask about that because um it from the pre I kind of toggle between like high-level management and then like still uh mingle, you know, enough with the practitioners right in our area. So whenever we go to conferences and this is one of the cool things about Accra, you get people from all different levels um and so when you start uh communicating with them, one of the things that they mentioned is just what you said, Matt, like What will this take my job, you know, will this, uh, will it be so successful that I will have nothing to do anymore and what is my new role gonna look like, um, in the office of admissions or registrar, um, but I think that there's also a space, um, to improve, um, so you know we talked a lot about transfer here there's a lot of processes that still happen manually. Even with the implementation of OCR and so it just gives us that time I feel to be um more involved in the student journey which is ultimately leads to transformation, right? And so uh I think it's you all make it sound so exciting and now I'm I'm getting like so so excited uh about this conversation. I used to be one of those people fearful of OCR because I've experienced a failed OCR implementation. And so when I came to um my new uh institution, they were like, we're in the middle of OCR and everyone's excited. I'm like, oh my gosh, are we gonna have to go backwards like I did in my last one, like, is it gonna fail? Is it, is it not gonna work? Uh, but you know, now that it has and that we're able to process articulations faster, it has freed up time, you know. Indirectly, uh, it was like a domino effect. It freed up time for the admissions office, right, in the registrar's office. And so therefore, uh, small tasks that we used to have like lifting bacter meningitis, um, um, hold, we've been able to move on to, uh, to the admissions office so that the recruitment team can actually go out there and recruit and not do. Do some of these office tasks, um, and so it's been really helpful even for us, but I do understand like the fear of success and maybe it's not the fear of technology it could you, you are right, it's a fear of it being so successful that you are maybe you're not ready or you don't know what to do with all of the um other roles and what your office is going to look like. I think there's, I think there's also a fear of choice. I mean, you, you're, you're talking about OCR, you know, the, um, optical credit recognition, you know, there's also XML, there's also EDI. So when you get into the actual data, uh, the OCR product is scraping that, that data off of the, of, of PDF and you know, that's, that's helpful, but What's the next step? And really what we, we try to um have those conversations with the, the, the institution or maybe it's a whole state um coming together is really advocating for the data to data exchange, the XML, the EDI because now you're, you're actually communicating securely. That's another big piece of the puzzle is You know, that data going from institution A to institution B and there's no PDF even being generated. And so those types of things get into, well, how do we put in, I think you get into other questions about processes and things like that. So, you know, there's, there's some options out there, you know, XML EDI OCR, you know, we're even. Um, Matt mentioned the standards. There's even um. Individuals that are looking at JSON and moving this stuff forward as technology moves forward. So, you know. Don't, don't get, don't get frozen, I guess, or stuck in those choices. Whatever works best for your institution. And you know, take that step forward and because it is, it is a huge success, it's a huge um success for security, it's a huge success for student experience and internal um processes and, and staffing resources as well. I mean, think about it if it was 5 years ago whenever uh COVID hit, you know, we were still coming in. Opening up mail for to get the PDFs, you know, if, if, if our institutions were exchanging data, that's just happening, you know, and now we're 5 years removed and um you know, there's institutions like mine that's not to that point yet and that. You know, that's, that's a time saver for us. Can I just come one more thing about um uh uh regarding OCR uh EDI XML, business continuity, that is what we've seen over the pandemic. um for business if business continuity alone is not going to get people excited about exchanging machine to machine data, I don't know what what will. If COVID didn't do it, I don't know what the next next thing was gonna, but, but I just. Wanna unpack a bit about OCR and uh machine to machine character uh uh uh machine to machine data exchange. OCR is has come a long way. We, we agree with that. And by the way, I was in OCR shop and we also uh abandoned OCR as well because we did not find. If we did not get the return on investment. We found that it was actually an impediment to data processing, but that, you know, that, that's just was our model, um, but the, but the notion of OCR is that is a, um, you're paying for that there's costs associated with that. We don't typically we don't own our own OCR uh instances we, we have vendors who support that and so there are, there are costs associated with that. I just want to be clear that the, the, the, the national student. House Speedy server or any other types of exchanges that are um that are using XML or EDI while consortiums do charge uh subscription fees, you can do this, you can do this whole cloth at no cost. Whole clock at no cost if all parties are registered for the the clearinghouse server and you have knowledge about what that means to exchange data. So what we're talking about here and the big takeaway here, these are all soft costs to get this off the ground. I soft cost is this is a one and done for most institutions. I think by and large of the hundreds of universities exchanging data over the server they would largely tell you that they built this and they deployed this and they haven't touched it since. Uh, we went live in early 2010 and other than dealing with some of the vagaries of EDI exchange, what happens when you get duplicate credit things like that, you have to deal with that, but those are one and done things we have not touched that code in more than a decade, and it just runs as we're on. This call I can see 200 records that have come in in process since this call and what that means is those 200 records have loaded and transferred credit reports have gone out to those students in real time without any intervention of anyone that is remarkable that is remarkable now you won't get there overnight and you won't get there until you have a high level of confidence in all of your systems. But it is absolutely achievable, and if anyone's thinking that is not something they would like to do for their students as improved services, they're not interested in improving student services. I love that example, Matt. The one thing I was just thinking about is student expectations and sort of service expectations in the 30 years that I've been doing this, expectations have increased a lot in the past 10 years, exponentially, uh, people just expect almost they click the button and it's gonna be back to them within seconds. The answer. They don't know the behind the scenes processes and the people that need to make some investigation or do judgment calls, but the fact that pieces of that pipeline can be sped up, as you just mentioned, 200 evaluations being um completed during the 20 minutes we've been on this call and, um, going back out in almost real time. It's pretty remarkable what you can get to, and then there may be other pieces that you delay for certain reasons, but you can at least have statuses in your portal that are letting students know things are happening with their document, with their admission, with their evaluation. Um, and so you can layer as many of those things that makes sense to you and your, your business model and your, um, sort of student demographic, what they're looking for, what kind of service they're expecting, all those things you can factor into the technology and layer these other things on top of the data exchange that can just happen 24/7. All year long, the computers are just talking to each other, sharing that data, and you can keep folks up to date. But that really helps that expectation piece. I know that's an interesting sort of phenomenon to watch people's expectations in this instant world that we live in. Everything we click a button and we think it's going to get dropped to the porch within 5 minutes, the delivery happens and things like that, so. No, Doug, nobody likes instant gratification. And, and I feel, uh, I feel called out because I'm that person that orders from Amazon and I'm like, OK, is it a same day delivery? No, no. Chasing my Amazon driver down. Uh, this is really good information. So I, I have a question that came up. OCR has the ability to, uh, read and articulate, uh, usually coursework, right? Or, or information from a transcript. Does EDI, like server to server institution to institution, is that true too? Can it read information? So think of it this way. This is a, the standard tells us what each each of these data columns represents. So we have the, when data is when data is transmitted both through EDI XML, and the new JSON, which is coming, new kid on the block, um, data in a column, we know what that data means because it's in the representative columns. So this could Be the course prefix in column C and the course number in column D and the grade in column E and the registered credit in column F and so forth and and so it's that data that the definition of the standard that defines that data. You know, we talk a lot about AI and AI, you know, AI is going to revolutionize what we do. But from this standpoint, I see AI coming on top of that transaction and saying great we have this data now let's look at AI for this incoming class and figure out. Of all of this data that we've received and, and how it articulates remember this is the data coming in, you still have to articulate it as a university you have to say if you're going to accept it in transfer you have to say it met the minimum grade requirement. That's not the purpose of the data transmission. The the purpose of the data transmission is to say. It's coming from this machine and it's loaded on this machine and you're gonna do whatever you're gonna do with it. The, the, the, the analysis is part of the AI is part of the articulation. But the, but the AI, if you're getting as an example, you have a feeder school and you get 1000 students from that feeder and you get that data from those 1000 students today and it's articulated and it's processed AI can do. Do its thing. Let's do, let's do class, um, you know, let's do class planning. Let's do demand analysis. Let's see what GE's are not met among these 100 students. That's the, that's the power of AI, right? So but this is, this is kind of step one for AI to get the data from one place to another in a reliable, secure, understandable, consumable format. And to put it, I, I, I feel like to come back to your question and put it just in simple terms, the, the OCR. That sending institution is already taking those columns like Matt said, column A, column B, column C and putting it on a PDF transcript so like we can read it, right? This is, and then it's scraping it to read, put it back into the data so the computer can see it, right? So this is taking that whole process out so that the computer is, the computers on either side are talking. You know, this is column A, this is column B, this is column C, so, you know, you, you, it's, it's even more of an efficient process because you're taking out that, OK, we're gonna print it to a PDF, you know, and then the receiving institution has to scrape it, you know, um, yeah, AI is gonna improve. Our world entirely, but in the basic terms is with EDI XML and JSON, it's, it's computer to computer and so it's, it's just those like Matt explained very well as, you know, it's column A is this and column B is that and yeah. One of the other things we found with those. There are definitely the technology over the over the years has come a long way. The tools are able to recognize and actually scrape the data more effectively and with higher quality than they used to, which, which is helpful. But some of the limitation for the receivers is you can still only scrape what's printed on the PDF. And so there may be other data that your process needs to feed it well or for a downstream piece of your process that you just don't receive on the PDF, and all of our institutions have their there are recommendations and best practices and suggestions I want to include on transcripts, but each sending school has the choice of what they're going to include. Maybe it had to be approved by somebody. Uh, at the school or the state level, um, and they're, they vary widely and even the look of them, some of them are portraits, some are landscapes, some are two column, and 3 column, all the various fonts, how easy are they to use, what identifiers are there for identifying the actual student. Um, I've seen some recently where there's not even an ID number of any kind. So not only not sending SSN, which used to happen and then it was partially masked, now there's not even the school student ID. So if, if there happens to be a fairly common name on that PDF when I receive it, my team's gonna have quite a hard time trying to match that application. And so, not to say that that can't happen in data as well, but one of the beauties of the standards, it's been around long enough, the standards body that oversees the development of the standards has heard from the community over the years, and we can keep adding fields of data. To those standards knowing that um the the data is gonna be shared from school to school so it's not going out in PDF it may I'll back that up a little in PDF it may also go to an employer or it may go to an insurance company or a benefit or something those folks don't need all the other data that admissions and evaluations. needed. So going school to school, you can include within the community, within the Aro community, we can share with each other other data that wouldn't be on the paper or PDF version, and then these data files become even more valuable because you have the data to automate and populate your processes. Which then leads nicely to what Matt was saying about the AI piece that down the road what kinds of things made the AI tools discover that we just didn't have time to look for, um, even if the data was there um so I think that bodes well for future, but even in the immediate, uh, you can get data that can actually help your processes so you don't have to use something like OCR as well as augment that with them doing. Research and finding out, oh, it's from this school, so that means we only get this data we'll need to go find the rest of the data somewhere else, those kinds of things. It is a good step for schools that can do that. You can dabble with it sending PDF is definitely easy. Um, it's, it's very quick and easy and you can use one document type for all the types of, uh, institutions and organizations you're sending to, uh, but I think on the receive side, when you're really trying to get data for the downstream processes is where the, the standards we're talking about today are really beneficial. And and if I could just piggyback on that a little bit and, and then open up the umbrella of what we're talking about because we're so far we've we've really limited the scope of this conversation to hm sending and receiving these pieces of data and what does that mean? But to to Doug's point, um, if you look at a fully fairly robust um built EDI or XML file, you'll have things not only those 5. Elements of the course level but you have things like academic um clemency right? uh we have things called uh freshman forgiveness at our institution where we will excuse certain grades and so how do you communicate that on the transcript? Well that is depending on the school that that may vary it does vary uh it will vary but not in the standard. The standard is very clear, uh, you know, we have instances where, uh, this student has academic clemency and we're not counting it and that's why if you do uh an aggregate calculation on our GPA, your uh your GPA calculation may not match ours, uh, and that's why that explains it but other things that are in these. Files are things like immunization records and very sensitive data that if you want to send that data you may send that data prior course learnings are things that are on there that are courses are are are learning instances or outcomes taken at other institutions that you have consumed at at your institution. So there are so many things that could be transmitted that will not be present that you do want to know absolutely but the other part here is that we're talking about you know getting started sending and receiving what you need to know is we have a whole suite of electronic standards that will allow you to request a transcript from Doug's institution and. Doug will respond by giving us that transcript through a format that standardized form, or he'll respond in a format that's standardized that says I can't find this student or I can't give you this student because there's a hold or any number of reasons. So we have sending receiving, acknowledgment standards. All of those are baked into to where there's no ambiguity about any part of the transaction. Did I get it? Yes, because I acknowledged it. Did the acknowledgement have the contents of what I actually received? It does, um, so there is, it is a whole cloth solution to exchanging from start to finish. The the other part of this is that in addition to just this, once you are on this basic level of transmission, accepting receiving, acknowledging sky is the limit. Uh, we, um, we, we, USC has one of the largest, the largest of, um, international student population in the country. I think NYU and USC kind of go back and forth, but if you're at. But if you're a graduate student, we must certify your prior degree and prior to implementing EDI we had no idea that we could we could mandate vendors to send data in EDI or XML formats and the reality is what that means is that the 4400 verifications we do a year, every one of them comes in through a transaction we don't handle. So anybody listening to this video who deals with international degree verification is right now falling off their chair wondering how they can do this because this is the ultimate nightmare for a school on processing rubble of data. It's the you have to, you have to have a body of knowledge that can translate it. You have to have a body of knowledge that understands the US equivalency. You have to have a body of knowledge of understanding even how you index these schools elsewhere. All of that is built into this and so not only that, that vendor I mentioned CollegeSource that had no idea what EDI was we they built a self-reported data system for USC to where any prospective undergraduate applicant can tell us where they went, what they studied, the courses, the grades they got, and they send that to us through a service through College source through EDI and we can tell them. What they're gonna get and transfer credit before they ever file an application for for uh for admission if that's not power I don't know what it is and we could not have done any of that if we just didn't decide to take that first step to say hm can we consume what other people are sending. So and we're not done with this. There are so many other things we want to leverage with this even from within schools your school wants to your law school wants to articulate data to your medical school or vice versa. You have that ability to use these transaction servers to do. All this stuff are your school going from a quarter system to a semester system? How do you do this? You can actually use EDI transactions over the clearinghouse to self-articulate your coursework to get it into the semester equivalency. I the sky is the limit and it's all free. It's all soft costs. Matt, I started my career in higher education in international education, and I was that person that manually manually, uh, evaluated the transcripts.-- A lot of-- it's a nightmare. It's exciting, but wow, the You know, the time it takes to to train people to do the manual work to compile international, uh, documents because wow, to all my international besties out there listening to this, you need to call the Speedy committee ASAP. And by the way, the vendor we, the vendor that um supported that was International Education Research Foundation. By the way, Wes will do this for you. By the way, ECE will do this for you. Many of the AC's members, um, all they need to do is understand the need, the business case, and they'll say, of course we would do this, of course we would that saves the ven those vendors uh just uh hand over fist in, in expenses and in doing this. Absolutely.-- And it saves the student time and money-- 100% because we're here to transform lives, right, and make their lives easier. I, I was, I was interested in what you said about other other things that we can uh use EDI for like vaccinations is one of the biggest barriers for our students of the submission of vaccinations in in Texas. I don't know if it's the same somewhere else, but they have to have bacterial meningitis if they are if they are gonna be um. If they are younger than 22 years old by the first aid class and so we get the students successfully through the um admissions funnel and then there's this submission of uh a vaccination records that creates a hold and so then the students kind of lingering, waiting. And we have to get it from the doctor and the doctor has to give it to them on paper and then they have to scan it in and you know, lengthy time with something that could be in minutes it seems, uh, you know, delivered to us sometimes takes 2 or 3 weeks right now. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Now we know that everybody in the registrar's office or register affiliated roles, y'all are FERPA police. Hands down, you keep us in check. So my question is what are some of the some of the challenges uh with all of this um. Uh, PDFs, EDIs, um, exchange of information, what are some of the challenges in terms of student privacy? Can I start with that because we, we had to, we had to, um, we had to jump into this pool when we, when we introduced the idea if, if you are in once we. Once UC decided we were going to receive EDI XML data, we also said we're not gonna be one of those schools that only receives. We're actually going to send as well, which is very uncommon for a four-year institution, but we said, you know, let, let's, let's do that. Let, let's set the example and so we did. So we, we have been sending outbound um since 2012, and by the way, sending outbound is a lot more difficult than receiving inbound, to be fair, it takes a lot more time. The time it takes to program your printer to print your transcript will be equivalent to the time it takes to get your outbound CBIX about the same printer. But the notion is when we did that, we then reached out to say, listen, would we be actually saving time and money if we said any of our trading partners, if you're willing to send us an elect formatted EDR XML electronic request for the transcript if you're willing to send that. We will guarantee we will fulfill that transcript order free of charge. And so the first thing we had to do is crack that nut of FERPA, right? Well, can we share that student's data? Um, well, if that student completes or attends USC and attends a and applies for admission to another institution, FERPA allows that institution to request that transcript data. And that's how we got around that. So we have partner agreements with schools to say you agree you will not request this any transcript data unless the student has applied for. Admission to your program and that is the guarantee so kind of both schools get in hot water if they violate that, right? But uh ultimately they'll sue the school sending for they're sending the request to us so, um, so but, but, but the notion is FERPA, you know, FERPA is a common sense, um, rule of law, and I think it does a really good job of understanding. Uh, you know, we had this whole conversation about reverse transfer, right? You know how FERPA and reverse transfer, how does that work? We, we crossed that bridge with that, um, so I think FERPA does a good job of being very commonsensical about exchanging data and when it would be appropriate. Um, I know if I sent a transcript to Doug and Doug had a question of fraud because it was a paper transcript and he didn't. He thinks maybe the grade, the transcript was altered. We can accommodate a response to his request through FERPA because we issued the transcript to Doug and Doug can say we have some questions. So, so FERPA does a good job of making sure the obstacles to exchanging data. Um, are, are there to protect the student, but in cases where you're exchanging data and students have applied, that's a great case use case where this is actually inbounds and we can do this, and that's how we got around knowing that if if we get a request for a transcript and that student actually didn't apply, who is the responsible party for making sure that there's an audit? Well, it's that sending school the sending the school sent the request. Any other like challenges that y'all are experiencing or that that some of our members might be experiencing uh with the data exchange part. One thing that comes to mind is identifying the school. So when you, when we talk about the data exchange, uh, or the partner whether the organization like mine or a school, um, when you talk about the data exchange, one of the goals of exchanging data is to automate as much as you can with checks and balances in place and reporting and error reporting and so on. Uh, but then the more you automate, the less someone is gonna see all the clean data that's flowing back and forth, but then the system needs to know who's this coming from, where is it gonna go to, and so on. And so there are a variety of institution codes in North America that have been in use. Some of them are statewide. Um maintain codes. Some have been some are defunct. They're from the 60s and 70s that were used for purposes, but we still hung on to some of the code sets um in Canada, we have several that are our federal um statistics reporting body assigns to schools. Some of those are defunct, some of them are not, or they're for a period in time that may not be intended for ongoing exchange of data, um, and so we kind of work through those issues. The standards allow us to. Um, use multiple codes, especially the XML, the newer version has a way to use multiple codes in case you speak in one code set and your training partner speaks in another, um, and then I'll introduce something that Matt's able to speak to much, much more than I am, but, uh, through the PES standards organization that we work with, um, there's the GEO code, the Global Education Organization code. And that's a code that maintained, developed and maintained bypass to identify schools and any education organization in the world. And so we have um several tens of thousands of codes assigned to post-secondary schools in most countries of the world now and working our way through high schools in the US and Canada, um, and so that hopefully Matt I set up a good seggue there for you if you'd like to add anything else about GEO code. I, I, I would just to give you a preference uh uh and, and this is, this is a real obstacle towards implementation and let me let me unpack first off what that means. Most schools when they record a prior degree or students have attended elsewhere, they, they, they pick a standard in North America, as Doug indicated, there are many standards. There's I, I'll just throw a few out there. There's iPads, there's CD, there's ice, there's OPEID. Um, and so you may get, you may get data in one of these, um, uh, machine to machine files that uses one of those that may not match how you internally index that. And so we call that crosswalking, uh, you'll need, you'll need to, if you're a school and you index by see as an example, what, what happens when you get something with OPEID? Well, you have to have a mapping from OPEID to see. The good news is we can help you with that. Um, in addition to that, what, when we, you, this is literally was the USC grassroots effort with PESC, um, when we started the International degree verification, what we realized is there's no one ID standard across the globe. Uh, although each country has and may have native indices, France has a native index, um, I, I, uh, India, China have native indices. There's no one global index. So what we did as a community, um, we created something called Geo code that has a, that has an ISO country standard with an ID for every post-secondary institution on the planet. And that is an immutable code that if you're, as an example, if you're bringing up Workday, we suggest you use Geocode and then map all of those native indices to the GEO code index and you'll have a master set that will last your last for forever. And so GeO code was put out there to say we have an immutable index now that anyone can use and map to their current native index that they used in their in student information system and it's a one-time thing. So the vendors that send us data, CloudSource, IERF Wes ECE, we asked them to use Geocode because Geocode is out there and it's ever present and it will always be present. And by the way, any of these native indices that we've mentioned like iPads, the, the ones in Canada, Doug, ISIS, ISIS, things like that, um, they're useless, but um. But, but the notion is those concepts are great, but none. are complete. Right? iPads doesn't have every institution. If you're, if you're indexing by FICE, a lot of schools do. Guys, FI was sunset in early 60s and replaced by OPEID. They just, it's the same number except OPID just adds a couple of zeros or. Some suffix to that to say it's a satellite campus or something like that, but the notion is um the ID that you need to in, in, in the transmission exchange that is a fundamental building block where did this student attend? It must have a unique ID. And that is something that's, that's kind of, but we, we consider geocode step one in exchanging data. This is the first step of exchanging international global data not just international all US institutions have a geocode all Canadian institutions have a geocode. All, all, all schools in China have geocodes. Uh, we've just expanded that to the secondary. Uh, market now so that, um, you know, if you can't get your file from the college examination board to see which high schools are out there, um, we can provide that, including with the college examination board number as a native index associated with the GEO code so a complete crosswalk that you can engage in your student information system to always know where that data came from, where that student studied absolutely. So I'll ask a question there, Matt. And it'll be a softball for you, but um, where can I go out and look up those geo codes? You can look up the geodes at www.s.org.org. And, and by the way that that those past geo codes are um if if if there are additions or corrections that is a community effort they um folks can submit um corrections or additions to that uh we do closely monitor that data it's not that you can update the database directly uh we have uh an entire steering committee that that deals with um maintenance of those data. That we have a 5 year commitment for each country to make sure we are uh maintaining schools that have merged or closed or that uh are are newly um newly offered, you know, are newly um created rather um so it it is a very it's an active standard and it's something that we have committed to indefinitely this is. This is in, in, in addition to the native indices, um, you know, Geocodes, uh, geocode is, is, is there, it's been widely adopted throughout the Northr throughout North America and you know, we're working on getting that adoption, uh, internationally for sure. Wow, that's a lot. We love it. This is, this is such exciting information. I feel completely mind blown. Uh, it's not often that you have such good conversations with the other side, right, with the registrar side, um, so this is really important and, and of course, always very relevant to the work we do. It's just, it's interesting to, to see and to know what happens behind the scenes, you know, what. Um, the things that people like me and recruitment and the admissions might not see every day, so kudos to you all, the masterminds behind, uh, helping us transform students, uh, students, uh, journeys at the institutions. Um, I wanted to ask how can professionals get involved with the Speedy committee? Yeah, um, so the Speedy Committee is, is like we mentioned, is an acro pack. Um, we have anywhere from 10 to 12 members that serve on this, and it's an actual working group. We meet, uh, every other week and we, we dive deep into these types of conversations. Um, we present at acro annual, crotech, um, yeah, and so it's one of those things that if you're interested in Speedy. Uh, go out to acro.org and, and look at electronic data exchange and there's some steps there that you can follow up with, uh, or you can reach out to us directly. Um, you know, we're always looking for people to be excited and, and help, help the conversation and move the initiative forward, so. Um, you know, there's, there's obviously that this is just 3 of the 12 individuals on the committee, but, um, you know, there's, there's longevity here, you know, um, and it's, it's something that's really exciting. It's, it's, as we get into, um, not only like we've been talking about EDI and XML, but you know, JSO's coming and you know, trying to formulate those uh standards, working with PE and Yeah, we have two individuals that um work on the pass board and are highly involved in past match one of them. Um, so, you know, it's, you can really dive into your own little niche and, and kind of explore and I mean, for my own selfishness, I'm, I'm learning this stuff, um, and that was my step forward, you know, and so it's something that you don't have to be doing this right now, EDI XML, uh transfer of data, um, you know, that, that's one of those things that, you know, we're helping the industry move forward, helping higher ed and each time those, you know, uh. Data exchange happens, you know, that's, that's impacting the student and and impacting those institutions in a positive manner. So it's it's rewarding work. I don't know if you, Matt or Doug, you have anything else to. What I will say is the only people I have ever known who who joined the speedy committee who have not been happy with their experience is those who don't want to join the committee and do the work. We, we are, we are a working committee and, and, and you just need to know that what that means is we assign you work we're active, we're going, even if you're are, are in the early implementation stage and part of the committee, uh, you know, we're going to pair you with people who maybe have been doing this for a while and, and, and. We're going to transfer that knowledge into your head so that you can transfer to others. Just that's the commitment when you're joining this group that, that, that's not always clear in some of the work groups in Acro, but that's, that's our commitment to this work group. So it's not just server to server, it's mind to mind. It is absolutely. And I'll just add, if folks aren't ready to actually be involved in the committee, but they do have questions, they want the help from the committee, we're definitely here to help anyone in the Aro community, we're volunteers that are passionate about this and here to help you. Um, we, we're willing to join in other if you have statewide initiatives, we have folks that reach out and set up Zoom calls with us or some kind of video conference so we can join in a session they're giving or just meet with some of their folks if we can't get to their campus. Sometimes we've had folks that are local who might be able to come and visit you at your campus and walk through some of the steps. So a number of ways that we can try to reach out depending on your situation and what you're hoping to accomplish. And you all will be at the annual meeting. Yes, we will. We're giving several questions there and we'll have a round table as well that people can come and ask their questions freely and, and joining the discussion as well as 4 or 5 sessions we'll give throughout the conference. I'm definitely gonna step into one of those.-- That's for-- sure. Well, thank you so much for sharing all the knowledge with us today. It was a pleasure to have you all on here, and I look forward to seeing you at the annual meeting then.-- Thank-- you. Thank you for having us. That wraps up today's episode on automating transfer articulation and the role of the Acro Speedy Committee in helping colleges and universities explore technology solutions. As we've discussed, the use of OCR, XML, EDI, and other innovative tools is making a significant impact on streamlining transfer processes and improving efficiency. We hope this conversation has sparked some ideas for how your institution can leverage these technologies to better serve students and enhance operation. A big thank you to our guests from the ACRS Speedy Committee for sharing their expertise. Be sure to join us next time as we continue exploring more ways technology is shaping the future of higher education. Thank you for listening and that's the team.