by Monterey Sims, AACRAO SPEEDE Committee member and Director, Admissions and Evaluation at the University of Phoenix
Bright and early on Monday morning, members of the AACRAO SPEEDE Committee--Doug Holmes, Sue Reyes, Tuan Do, Jeff Elliott, Jerry Bracken, Matt Bemis, Joey LaConte, Michael Maysilles, and myself--kicked off the series of Electronic Data Exchange (EDX)-related sessions with a Roundtable. About 20 participants from a wide variety of institutions and roles participated in an in-depth conversation about how to implement electronic data exchange at their institutions and across their feeder schools.
Interestingly, in many cases, technology was not identified as the primary barrier to EDX implementation. Rather, getting buy-in at their institutions, within their districts, or in their states, to invest in the time and effort to implement EDX is really the biggest challenge they are facing. The group discussed how there is sometimes an unwillingness at various levels of an institution to adopt a new business process that can potentially create efficiencies that would possibly eliminate positions.
This desire to hold on to traditional and comfortable ways for doing our work, specifically as it relates to sending and receiving academic transcripts from institution to institution for our transfer students, can have a negative impact on student services, processes and institutional partners. Even worse, it can open our institutions up to a greater potential for receipt of fraudulent credentials and/or unnecessary exposure of our students’ sensitive personally identifiable information (PII).
Various members of the committee and audience offered great advice to overcome some of the fears that are associated with change. This included the idea of repurposing staff and downsizing through attrition rather than reductions in force. For example data-entry roles might be realigned to roles working directly with students’ or roles focusing on troubleshooting the exceptions which do not flow smoothly through an automated process.
In the end, we all walked away with a better understanding and insight of the challenges we each face in our respective institutions, and an acknowledgement that change is hard and requires planning and communication. Best of all, everyone left with a new set of resources both technical and personal that we can tap into to improve our ability to overcome barriers and implement EDX on our campuses.
For additional info on this and other EDX sessions please check the
Engage app or email
SPEEDE@AACRAO.ORG.
Thanks for attending AACRAO Tech and Transfer 2018!