Institutions of higher education have long benefited from the cultural and economic contributions of students from around the globe. More than ever before, learners worldwide are crossing institutional borders in search of improved opportunities bringing with them a vast array of knowledge claims. With this comes recruitment, enrollment and completion challenges that must be addressed to progress student mobility.
This phenomenon creates a consequential increase in administrative and academic resource burdens stemming from an influx of credit assessment and offer applications. Up to now, in-house processes have been manual, paper based and attempted with a lack of coordinated communication spanning advising, administrative and academic departments. Or the task is outsourced, which risks delivering isolated review and validation decisions with questionable accuracy and authenticity.
Meanwhile, learners are faced with a maze of opportunities when trying to decide where and how to best pursue a degree or credential. They are impeded by vast, disjointed sources of information about study plans, program requirements, course offerings and articulation. Students today have come to expect transparency in the transfer credit process and want specific answers to inquiries within a few days, not weeks.
So, how can an institution effectively evaluate every incoming request of credit for prior learning from outside sources both in a timely manner and with rigor?
For The University of Adelaide and Charles Sturt University, the adoption of innovative technology solutions developed to overcome these challenges was key. They imagined the power of automated and responsive workflows within a learner centric platform and tools to engineer a coordinated effort between administrative and academic faculties simplifying the management of prior learning assessment and credit offers. A virtual repository can be populated with comparables, precedents and prescriptive pathways to streamline institutional processes and accelerate conveyance offer turnaround times. By decreasing the time to generate a credit offer and providing a set of structured online advising services, they preserve a learner’s interest in their institutions and, once enrolled, keep them on track to completion.
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