AACRAO released an implementation guide to help registrars, admissions officers, student affairs professionals and campus IT personnel as they implement and share Comprehensive Learner Records (CLRs). The “Implementation of the IMS Global Comprehensive Learner Record Standard: A Practical Guide for Campus Personnel” was written by an AACRAO workgroup that came together under the sponsorship of AACRAO Board of Directors vice presidents Kristi Wold-McCormick and Rock McCaskill to write a guide that would be focused on mapping learner data to the CLR Standard.
Mark McConahay, retired Associate Vice Provost and Registrar at Indiana University Bloomington, chaired the workgroup and led the members through several exercises and developed templates to help them map the data used in their CLRs into the CLR Standard that was developed and released by IMS Global in 2019. The resulting guide provides use cases from several different institutions with varying learning activities, ranging from technical education to academic courses to high-impact practices outside the classroom. The academic transcript is also a use case to show that it is possible to carry much of that data through a CLR.
“The nimbleness and flexibility of the IMS CLR standard is one of its great strengths”, McConahay explained, “but this characteristic can also lead to a variety of applications of the standard to higher education credential elements which could make the ingestion and interpretation of the information by others difficult. One of the objectives of the workgroup was to suggest mapping of key CLR elements into the standard in a manner that would allow easier interpretation by consumers.“
In addition, McConahay noted that the workgroup members, in addition to their enthusiasm and dedicated support, brought varied real-world CLR examples, the institutional intent associated with each and the expertise to place their credential elements into the structures of the IMS CLR standard.
Participating institutions included Central Oklahoma University, Elon University, Indiana University, University of California San Diego, University of Maryland Global Campus, University of North Texas, Volunteer State College, and Western Governors University. The workgroup also included two representatives from the AACRAO SPEEDE Committee, Patrick Elliott and Tuan An Doh. Dr. Laura Wankel represented NASPA, with whom AACRAO partnered on the CLR work from 2015-2021. Jeff Bohrer and Mark Leuba from IMS Global supported the workgroup with technical assistance.
AACRAO’s earlier guidance on the CLR standard recommended that institutions and companies who implement or provide services to share CLRs use the IMS Global Standard. This allows these records to be machine-readable and interoperable across institutional types and information systems. As more and more colleges and universities develop CLRs for their students/learners, this will ensure that they can be exchanged with other institutions and that they will be interoperable with other systems, such as employer and military records systems, as those are developed.
Visit AACRAO's Comprehensive Learner Record Signature Initiative page to view resources, testimonials, news, and more.