As University of Maryland Global Campus’s (UMGC) total enrollment trends toward 100,000 students, everything we do must be at scale. Operational efficiency has a significant impact, including back-office processes related to transfer credit. Transfer credit is particularly important at UMGC because more than 80% of our students come with previous college experience and other sources of prior learning.
The Academic Services and Quality team I lead at UMGC has responsibility for supporting the process for awarding transfer and other forms of credit. We use data in a variety of ways to analyze opportunities to increase the efficiency of our work to improve the student experience.
Process Mapping Transfer Credit
The process for awarding credit for prior learning follows three steps. First, the student provides a transcript or other record of academic and nonacademic experience that documents prior learning. These records must be captured as student data in the student information system. Next, the courses and learning experiences must be matched against the almost 2 million articulation rules in our database. These rules come from institutional transfer agreements, ACE recommendations and individual course review. Finally, the articulated credit is applied to the student’s academic plan and degree requirements.
Over time, different teams began sharing these functional steps inconsistently. While most data entry is done early in the process, in some cases the data entry was managed at the last stage. In some cases, where articulation rules did not exist, they were created for an individual student late in the process. As a result, processes became less efficient and consistent.
To address this challenge, data entry was standardized as occurring early in the process. Likewise, all articulation assignments were centralized, and all rules were captured in the articulations rule database.
One of the outcomes of this process was that it became easier to identify bottlenecks and new ways to resolve constraints on the performance of the entire process.
Automate What Can Be and Create Capacity for What Cannot Be Automated
One of the identified bottlenecks within the transfer credit process was data entry. Very few transcripts or other documentation arrive at UMGC as data. In most instances, we receive documents that include data that must be entered manually. After sharing our experiences with other universities, we identified a product called Raptor that can enhance the scanning process to reduce manual data entry. As a cloud-based service, Raptor learns to read transcripts from a variety of institutions. The date entry role becomes one of a data checker to ensure the accuracy of Raptor’s analysis. This approach reduces processing time, and it also reduces errors from data entry.
At UMGC, we continually look for new ways to recognize student learning from outside the traditional classroom. One of these efforts originated from our criminal justice program, which sought to provide credits for police officers who had attended a police academy. Initially, we did this within Maryland in a traditional process of reviewing the academy curriculum and assigning that to UMGC course equivalencies. That process, though, did not scale. Faculty developed a new model based on the content and outcomes all academies nationally shared.
However, the challenge is that, while the standardized articulations specify the credit to be awarded, the documentation from a police academy for graduation is not consistent to determine if a student is eligible for the credit. This is not something an automated system like Raptor can learn to process. Thus, manual processing is required. By automating what we can, though, we have the bandwidth to manually process records such as police academy completion.
Credit for Military Rank
UMGC leverages the ACE recommendations on military education and occupations as a key source for awarding credit for prior learning. While the ACE work is foundational, it is not universal in its coverage and is often generic in its recommendations, which means that often credit applies to electives or general education but not always to major courses. To address these limitations, UMGC launched a pilot to identify opportunities to award credit beyond what currently exists in the ACE recommendations.
We started by analyzing the skills and competencies aligned with military rank across services. For noncommissioned officers to be promoted, they receive leadership training and practice these skills in their work. We then aligned this skills data with our own courses to identify transfer options. Generative AI made recommendations for articulation of leadership skills to UMGC coursework in management. Faculty then reviewed and refined these recommendations into credit for specific courses based on the student’s military rank. Since fall 2024, almost 5,000 students have received credit through this effort, and outreach continues both to existing and new students.
Credit for Concurrent Learning
As we looked at the data on how many transcripts we processed for students, we realized that about half of all records were for students who were already enrolled at UMGC. Adult students certainly enter UMGC with prior learning through education and work, but they do not stop learning outside the classroom when they start taking college courses. Military students advance in rank and receive additional military training. Civilian students likewise have additional training at work.
Students may also leverage partnerships with other educational providers to earn additional credits. To better serve students, we have expanded our thinking from just credit for prior learning to credit for concurrent learning after a student has enrolled and is taking classes at UMGC. Making this process more efficient is essential for students to see how new external credits apply to their degree programs and shorten their time to graduation.
Program Plan Changes
One source of work to serve existing students is when students change their programs of study, as it requires rebuilding their academic degree plan to new requirements. A specific example is academic minors. Unlike a major, UMGC students do not declare a minor at the time of application for admission. A minor is an optional add-on that must be requested later. The data shows a great deal of churn where students would request a minor to be added and then later to be removed, resulting in three different cases to update the academic plan. Since the minor reduces the number of available elective courses, adding a minor often extends the time and cost of a degree for the student when existing credit could be used for electives. As a result, many students would drop the minor.
This data was instrumental in reconsidering the use of minors at the university. We continue to evaluate the process for program plan changes to better serve students and are also investigating better options for students to explore different programs and how their existing credits apply to degree requirements, which can potentially shorten their path to graduation.
Future Steps
One of the applications we are working on is automatically awarding stackable certificates to a student. Today, a student must apply to add a certificate to their academic plan, then apply for graduation for the certificate. The university has invested in the development of stackable certificates across the curriculum. Often these do not require additional coursework for the student and offer a credential on the way to earning a degree as well as highlighting specific areas of accomplishment. Our goal is to develop a process where we can award these certificates to students automatically as they complete the requirements without students having to both add the certificate to their plan and apply for graduation.
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