Transfer Credit Evaluation with IDP

The Transfer Credit Evaluation with Intelligent Document Processing starts with a Transcript Evaluation Specialist in the Registrar’s office submits a transcript image to the process using a file upload on a form. The image is sent via API data connector to ProcessMaker’s Intelligent Document Processing engines where smart OCR, using artificial intelligence and machine learning, extracts the coursework from the image and returns it to the workflow for user validation. The user then reviews the result of the OCR and makes edits to the data in a screen. Once the data is validated, the user submits the data to the workflow where each course is checked against a collection containing equivalency rules. Gateways tag courses that match to an equivalency rule automatically populate with the equivalent course. Unmatched courses are routed to the next step in the workflow. An Email is sent to the next user in the process. The user clicks on a url in the email which takes the user to a unauthenticated webentry form to capture course descriptions from the university’s website (or from a third party like CollegeSource). Once all course descriptions are captured and tagged to the appropriate department for routing, the workflow sends a notification to the appropriate academic faculty. The faculty member authenticates with their username and password to review the information coming from IDP and the user who captured the course description. The faculty makes a determination and selects the equivalent course(s). The system captures each step of the process and logs every notification, decision, etc. Multiple courses going to multiple decision-makers are sent in parallel. As the decisions are made, the rules are written back to the equivalency table for faster processing the next time that course is submitted. When all courses have been evaluated, the system generates a PDF Transfer Credit Report that can be sent to the student, admissions office, and archived in a DMS. The process terminates. Video

Start request from dashboard: https://universitydemo.pm4trial.processmaker.net

User access: 1Password

gina (Transfer Credit Evaluation Specialist)

student worker (anonymous)

bianca (faculty)

INTERNAL ONLY

Open

Be sure to remove Calc I equivalency prior to doing a demo

Start the demo by logging in as user ‘gina’ who is a Transfer Credit Evaluation Specialist working in the enrollment area - either the registrar’s office or maybe the admissions office. Gina’s job is to evaluate incoming transcripts for both prospective students and returning students and provide equivalency decisions on the coursework presented in the student’s transcript. She may evaluate hundreds in a day. Therefore, she has a dashboard that gives organizes her work for her.

Walk the user through Gina’s dashboard:
”Quick Action Buttons” at the top show us that Gina has administrative permissions for the system - to manage the approvers, Sommerlin’s courses, and equivalencies that the system uses.
”Recent Evaluations” gives Gina a quick view of each of the evaluations that have run through the process with the most recent ones at the top. She can search by name, she can sort by any of the columns, etc to manage her work and find evaluations.
”Manage Approvers” is an area where gina can assign faculty approvers by academic department. Some institutions may assign this work on different categories than what we use in our demo, those can be accommodated in a similar way. Click into the Manage Approvers, show that gina can edit row by row, or that she could import records from a csv file. Note to the users, that these can also be populated from an API if the system connected has APIs available.
”Manage Equivalencies” is where the system adds equivalency decisions as they are made, so that the system stores that decision for the next time the course is presented. It gets “smarter” and “faster” over time.

Go back to the top and click on “New Evaluation Upload”. Walk the audience through the progress bar at the top of the screen that shows them how this transcript progresses through the system. Right now, we are at the receive courses step and will move to the Confirm Courses step.
Click on Select File and import the Weber State University transcript sample (attached below, you’ll need to download this to your machine so you can easily access it for demos).

As soon as you select a file, the API sends that image over to Doculayer where the Intelligent Document Processing uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to extract the coursework from the transcript.
**NOTE: in this current iteration, no student data is populated on the screen and no institution data. Product Management will be working on this to provide institution and student matching. For now, you can enter the students information. ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT to accurately type in the Institution Name in the form at this step or the rest of the demo process will not work correctly.

Fill in the student data:
Student ID Number | Student Name (first and last) | Plan of Study/Major (BIO) | Admit Year (2023) | Plan of Study/Minor (leave blank) | Admit Session (FALL)
Fill in the institution name: Weber State University (if that is the example you use in your demo)

You can zoom in on the image and make a quick correction to one of the rows. Then submit the transcript to the workflow process.

Behind the scenes, the newly submitted courses are being matched against the known equivalencies that we saw on the dashboard. Go back to Gina’s dashboard by clicking on the home icon in the upper left.
The new transcript should appear in Gina’s “Recent Evaluations” list at the top. Click the arrow to open the record. Show the courses that have auto matched (in the right hand column), use the pagination to page through until you find a course that is pending.

Log out as Gina. THIS IS IMPORTANT!

Click into a browser tab to your bookmarked email (make sure you have set up a filter in your email to capture all the Sommerlin emails and place them into a folder that you bookmark in your browser for demos. This will allow you to open your email to only that folder containing the Sommerlin demo emails and not show the audience your entire email box).

The next step in the process is to capture the course descriptions for those courses where there were no known equivalencies. This can be done two ways. 1) If an institution has a license to use CollegeSource’s API’s we can use that to automatically capture the course descriptions, OR, 2) we can send this step to a user whose responsibility it is to research the course description manually from a third-party (like CollegeSource) or from the sending institution’s own website. Our demo environment is set up as a “low-code”, “non-integrated” solution, so we have the system send an email to our department email address where are student workers will receive a link with the courses to research. These students do not have any access to the system, they only get to the form through a link in an email.

Open the link in the email in an “Incognito Window”

The student worker’s view does not contain any identifying information about the student who sent the transcript. All they see is the institution and courses. You can demo this by just typing something in the course description and url and then selecting the department to route to. Otherwise, you can also go to the institution’s website, find the catalog for that year and then look up the course descriptions for the unmatched courses. Once all the course descriptions, url and departments are populated on the form, you can submit. Refer back to the “Manage Approvers” collection that we saw on Gina’s dashboard as the next step of the process uses what is selected during this step to send the next task to the department approver.

This next step in the process takes a little time before the email notifications start coming in. You can tell the audience that the process is being “woken up” and it is routing these courses simultaneously to the various approvers at the same time. You can pull up your email and refresh until the email comes in. Click on the URL, log in as ‘bianca’. The url will take you to one of the courses that was submitted from the previous step. Select the equivalent course from the drop list and hit submit. It will take you to Bianca’s open task list. You can then work through the entire list, or you can go back and forth clicking through the emails. It does paint a nice picture in the email because you can show the audience that the emails are sent simultaneously, and each one is going to a different approver. However, some institutions will not like that, and will prefer a single person (or a few persons) to make all equivalency determinations for the institution. So, showing them Bianca working the whole list gives them this alternative user experience.

Log out as Bianca (IMPORTANT).

Go back to your email, you should get an email to the student that has a PDF Transfer Credit Report attached. Show the audience that the system has generated a PDF report from all the data collected during the process. And, it has emailed it directly to the student. (This is shown as an option- and to highlight the capabilities of the platform, but is left up to the institutions preference for notifications). Simultaneously, an email is sent to Gina letting her know that the process has completed for the student, AND an email has also been sent to the Admissions officer letting them know the student email and report was sent. You can mention that the document can be sent to their long-term document storage system.

Log back in as Gina one last time. Show that the report is now complete in her dashboard. Open the case, browse to the courses you equated during the process. Show that those records are now “Matched” (as opposed to auto-matched) and that the No Equivalency course is “No Match”.
Go to Manage Equivalencies and show that the equivalency rule was added to the table and the next time that the process runs for that institution’s course, it will automatically match. The system will get faster and “smarter” over time.

This concludes the demo of the process and you can open it up to questions.

NOTE: You should always leave at least ONE course equated as “No Equivalency” usually, I like to use the Billiards course on the Weber State University example. This is so that the next time you run the demo, there will always be one course that needs to go for review. However, before and/or after each demo you should pic one course (I use Calculus I) to delete from the Course Equivalency table so that next time you run it, it is not auto-matched and you can show an equivalency being selected by the approver and then automatically added to the equivalencies table.

1. Can system record all the decisions so we don't have to review them over and over again? Can we transcribe the courses into the form and reduce data entry?

2. Can I use the equivalencies in my system of record (Banner, Colleague, Jenzabar, CollegeSource TES, etc.?)

3. How do you handle multiple equivalencies for the same course based on XYZ (usually, the major, minor, degree, etc.)

4. How do you handle multiple courses that equate to one course, or one course coming in that equates to multiple courses at my institution?

5. Do you integrate with <<Fill in the blank system>>

   1. SIS

      1. Ellucian Banner

      2. Ellucian Colleague

      3. Jenzabar One

      4. CollegeSource TES

   2. CRM

      1. Slate

      2. Ellucian Recruit

      3. Salesforce

   3. DMS

      1. OnBase

      2. Perceptive Software

      3. Softdocs

      4. Laserfiche

Daytona State College

Abilene Christian College (2)

Abilene Christian College 1

Campbellsville College

Coe College

Western Iowa Tech

Michigan State University

Salt Lake Community College

Eastern Oregon University

Western Oregon University (WOU Discovery)

St. Joseph’s College - CollegeSource TES Demo

Adelphi University