Electronic Transcripts - EDI in Academic Administration


Copyright 1991 CAUSE From _CAUSE/EFFECT_ Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 
1991. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is 
granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for 
commercial advantage, the CAUSE copyright and its dateappear, and notice 
is given that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for 
managing and using information resources in higher education. To 
disseminate otherwise, or to republish, requires written permission. For 
further information, contact CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, 
Boulder, CO 80301, 303-449-4430, e-mail info@CAUSE.colorado.edu


           ELECTRONIC TRANSCRIPTS--EDI IN ACADEMIC ADMINISTRATION
                             by E.W. Carson

ABSTRACT: The SPEEDE Task Force of the American Association of 
Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) has developed 
electronic data interchange (EDI) standards for exchanging academic 
records between colleges and universities. Implementing EDI in registrar 
and admissions offices can improve speed, costs, and accuracy, and 
provide a prototype for a variety of campus business applications.

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E. W. Carson is Director of Learning Strategies at Virginia Polytechnic
Institute and State University, responsible for evaluating current and
new teaching and learning strategies. This includes considerations of
multimedia, communications, computers, facilities, administrative
support structures, and policies, with the goal of developing a strategy
and plan to improve teaching and deliver courses more effectively and
efficiently. Dr. Carson represents CAUSE on AACRAO's SPEEDE Task Force.

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Computer networks offer a significant tool for reducing time and effort
in exchanging administrative information between college and university
campuses. Administrative processes that can be handled electronically,
through computer communications, include informal exchanges, ad hoc
requests for data, exchange of official documents, and transfer of
funds. The same principles of electronic communications now used so
effectively in the business sector--in particular, electronic data
interchange (EDI)--can be applied to administrative processes in
academe.

Colleges and universities should find EDI--the exchange of
electronic information among "trading partners" to conduct business--
useful both in traditional business transactions, such as purchase
orders, shipping orders, invoices, and payments, and in exchange of
academic information, such as student transcripts. This article focuses
on electronic transcript exchange as an EDI transaction through which
institutions may realize improvements in speed, costs, and accuracy, and
describes work that has led to a national standard for electronic
transcripts exchange through EDI.

What is EDI?

Most members of the academic community are familiar with electronic
mail in concept if not through experience. EDI is similar to e-mail in
that documents are exchanged rapidly over electronic networks. However,
EDI documents are more structured than e-mail and typically are
manipulated more than e-mail notes by the sending and receiving
software.

The structured EDI documents often contain standardized codes that
permit machine processing in ways not appropriate for most e-mail. In
fact, some EDI transactions may involve only computer-to-computer
communications with post-audits and human actions taken only after the
computer exchanges. Electronic exchanges of data require enclosing EDI
documents in special "electronic envelopes" using standards approved by
ANSI, the American National Standards Institute. These envelopes include
an identification of the type of document, identification and addresses
of the sending and receiving parties, and data verification elements.
EDI documents are sent from an application to a translator that puts the
data into an EDI format with its associated identifiers and codes. The
document is transferred electronically to the recipient, where it is
translated and used in the recipient's application.

EDI first enjoyed widespread use in the 1970s in the transportation
industry--rail, trucking, air freight, and ocean shipping. According to
Henry Meetze, president of RailLinc Corporation, there are approximately
one million daily EDI exchanges between railroad companies and their
suppliers, and on peak days the number of exchanges exceeds two million.
While a bill of lading can cost up to $13.00 using paper documents and
standard mail, the same document can be prepared and delivered for as
little as $1.50 with EDI. The grocery industry--which began using EDI in
1981 followed by the warehousing industry a year later--estimates
savings due to EDI use at approximately $300 million dollars annually[1]

In recent years, there is ample evidence that EDI is gaining
momentum within academe. Many campuses are already exchanging data
electronically and all will be required to do so for federal financial
aid programs by 1992. Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT)--a type of EDI--is
a common method of handling paychecks at colleges and universities. Some
states and campuses are exploring EDI for bids and purchase orders. A
few institutions have electronic forms for local administrative
functions; merging a local electronic purchase order with an external
EDI of the same document seems a logical next step. Finally, statewide
and local groups of institutions have exchanged electronic academic
transcripts for several years using locally developed standards.

Electronic transcript exchange--emerging
national standards

In the 1980s several registrars, directors of admissions, and data
processing specialists began to explore the exchange of electronic
transcripts. By the mid-80s the state of Florida had established the
Florida Information Network for all state high schools and colleges.
Many schools in Florida were exchanging electronic academic records
using standards developed within the state. Members of the Association
for Higher Education in North Texas have also exchanged electronic
academic records using their own standards. Colleges and universities in
several other states (California, Georgia, Ohio, New York, and Virginia)
have expressed interest in the electronic exchange of academic records,
and Arizona institutions have begun such implementations.

The need for a national standard format for such academic exchanges
was recognized in a session on electronic transcripts at the 1987
national meeting of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars
and Admissions Officers (AACRAO). The following year, an AACRAO task
force was named to develop standards and procedures for the electronic
exchange of transcripts. This task force--to which the author was
appointed to represent CAUSE--began its deliberations in early 1989. The
task force--and the EDI standard format it has developed--are now known
as SPEEDE (Standardization of Postsecondary Education Electronic Data
Exchange).

While the title behind the SPEEDE acronym implies that only
postsecondary records are included, the task force has coordinated its
efforts with a similar committee working on standards for K-12 records,
the Interstate Task Force on K-12 Electronic Transcripts, funded by the
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). SPEEDE's goal is a
single national standard for all academic records. Such a single
standard would have obvious advantages in reduced maintenance of
computer programs to process academic records.

The AACRAO task force determined that its standard should conform
to those of the ANSI X12 committee (see the sidebar on the facing page
for details of EDI standards), for several reasons:

  *  File and transfer protocols had already been developed by the ANSI
X12 committee for other transactions; there was no need to duplicate
these efforts.

  *  The AACRAO standards would be aligned with a nationally approved
standardization agency that is working toward international standards.

  *  Having an ANSI standard would make it easier for institutions to
integrate EDI academic records with other EDI transactions more typical
of the business world. Already established code sets maintained by other
organizations might be useful in academic records.

  *  Finally, the ANSI standards were in wide use and with proven
reliability in high-volume exchanges of complex documents.

The AACRAO task force developed its academic records EDI format
over a two-year period, freezing its development in November 1990 for at
least one year of testing and evaluation. While developing the SPEEDE
format, the task force worked closely with ANSI to ensure that it would
conform to their requirements. AACRAO joined ANSI and applied to have
the format approved as an ANSI X12 standard. The transaction has cleared
a first ballot in the ANSI ASC X12 committee and is now in a rebuttal
ballot stage. It will be put before ANSI for final approval in February
1992. AACRAO has also requested ANSI X12 approval to begin work on two
new transactions: (1) electronic request for a student transcript, and
(2) response to a request for a student transcript.

The SPEEDE file format (see the sidebar on page 6 for details) has
been in "beta test" for the past year during which colleges and
universities were encouraged to use the format for evaluation and
production purposes. The task force prepared a detailed manual on the
file format and sent it to the institutional representative for each
AACRAO member school early this year. The manual contains the technical
details needed by programmers to prepare EDI software for preparing
SPEEDE transcripts for sending and reading, printing, or otherwise
processing EDI transcripts[2]

Growing interest in SPEEDE

Medical and law schools have shown a keen interest in
electronically exchanging transcripts and have participated in the
activities of the SPEEDE task force. The Law School Admissions Services
(LSAS) receives approximately 134,000 transcripts annually.
Electronically processing its transcripts could significantly reduce
clerical work and reduce the time required to process applications. LSAS
has provided ideas and data to the task force, and helped print the
first set of standards now under evaluation. The Association of American
Medical Schools has also endorsed the SPEEDE project.

Commercial electronic network suppliers and vendors of student
records systems have shown significant interest in providing third party
support for the electronic exchange of transcripts. Representatives from
BT Tymnet, General Electric Information Services, and Western Union have
attended SPEEDE workshops, and representatives from American Management
Systems, Information Associates, and Systems & Computer Technology
Corporation have expressed interest in providing functions in their
records systems to support SPEEDE formats and electronic exchanges.

The state of Florida has mandated that all academic records from
state institutions be exchanged electronically by December 1991. It
appears that at least 80 percent of the educational institutions in
Florida will be exchanging academic records electronically by the end of
this year, most of them using the SPEEDE format. Selected campuses in
Texas, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Arizona are now testing and converting
to the SPEEDE format. The experience of these schools clearly shows that
exchanging electronic academic records--and using a widely accepted
standard--is feasible.

Why EDI for transcript exchange?

Assuming appropriate security measures are taken, the AACRAO task
force has identified the following benefits of using EDI to exchange
transcripts:3

  *  Privacy and integrity are protected at a reasonable level, perhaps
even better than our present paper systems in the desktop
publishing/color copier age. Proper acknowledgement will alert the
sender to any modification of the transmitted data, whether
intentionally or by accident.

  *  Integrity of data will be strengthened when transcript materials
no longer have to be rekeyed into your system, with the accompanying
possibility of introducing errors into the data. Instead, machine-
readable transmissions will feed data into your transfer credit
evaluation, or other systems.

  *  The electronic transmission of transcripts and logging of
acknowledgements will mean that much of this exchange can be "untouched
by human hands," saving time and money. No recurring changes in
encryption routines will have to be maintained.

  *  The newer, fiber-optics transmission systems are much faster than
their predecessors, and certainly faster than the mail. Some transcripts
may be received the same day they are ordered.

  *  Electronic exchanges will mean better service to the student. If a
transcript is lost in today's paper mail system, you may not know for
weeks until an irate student finally contacts you. In this system,
failure to receive an acknowledgement that your transmission was
received at its destination will alert you immediately.

The advantages of EDI for academic records are not restricted to
faster and lower-cost transmissions of records. Automatic checking of
duplicate credits and posting of approved transfer credits can be
performed without clerical or administrative handling. Assessment of
student preparation by feeder schools and evaluations of student
performance at receiving schools will be greatly enhanced by electronic
processing of EDI transcripts.

In an ideal EDI world many data exchanges and the resulting
processing would proceed without human intervention. In a registrar's
office of tomorrow, for example, a computer could receive and verify a
request for a transcript from a trading partner, issue the transcript,
and confirm that the requesting school received the transcript. In a
reverse transaction, a computer could receive the transcript, verify
that it came from its trading partner, send an acknowledgement of the
transcript, check the student's records and assign appropriate transfer
credits, notify the student and the student's advisor of the transfer
credits, or notify the registrar of an enrollment problem at the other
institution.

What will it take?

ACCRAO policy states that student academic records received in
useable electronic form transmitted from computer to computer should be
considered as official documents provided they are received:

  *  over an electronic network using a standard transmission format
previously agreed upon by both the sending and the receiving
institutions with proper security utilized by the network; or

  *  on electronic media (such as diskette or magnetic tape),
physically exchanged using appropriate security to ensure that the media
were received from the sending institution.

Institutions interested in creating a campus EDI system could face
anything from relatively low to major setup costs, depending on their
existing networking infrastructure. For the many schools now connected
to one or more electronic networks over which documents can be
transmitted, the marginal costs for the delivery of transcripts in
electronic form could be very small. However, campuses that would have
to join networks for electronic transcript transmissions could find the
costs high, especially if dedicated phone lines are required and if the
only use of these connections is for transcripts. When a network
provides remote computing, non-transcript file transfers, and e-mail,
the costs assigned to transcript transmissions could be much less than
using standard mail.

Some schools will use mainframes or distributed minicomputers as
the source of data and as the communicating machines. Transcripts can be
sent over dedicated lines connected to campus networks that are in turn
connected to external networks. Low volume exchanges might be conducted
using the simplest and smallest system consisting of a personal
computer, a modem, and simple translation software.
There are several network systems that can be used for electronic
transcripts.

(1) The widely available BITNET and Internet systems require a
modest annual subscription, a dedicated line to a host on the network,
and a routing service. Users need not be concerned about the details of
routing but need only know the electronic address of the recipient.
Acknowledgement of e-mail deliveries is an option available with
BITNET/Internet systems, but transcripts will likely be delivered by
sending files as opposed to standard e-mail. EDI provides an independent
transaction to acknowledge receipt of a document that is separate from
e-mail acknowledgements. AACRAO encourages use of the EDI
acknowledgement transaction with each set of transcripts received in the
SPEEDE EDI format. Internet transfers of transcripts in EDI formats will
be very cost effective for campuses already connected to the Internet.

Campuses not connected to the Internet should consider the
advantages of Internet connections for all faculty and students.
Internet connections provide such functions and services as maintenance
of electronic addresses and automatic routing, e-mail, file exchanges by
file transfer protocol (FTP), and access to many external information
resources. These schools could leverage EDI as one of several services
to make each function cost effective, not to mention the potential role
of the NREN (National Research and Education Network) in these
administrative activities.

(2) Commercial Value Added Networks (VANs) provide "store and
forward" and batch processing services for EDI documents. Vendors vary
in the services provided and the fees charged with some charging by the
number of characters transmitted and others by the number of
transactions (transcripts) sent. Most commercial vendor systems provide
functional acknowledgements that are automatic notifications that the
document was received. VANs also provide audits and periodic reports on
the number of documents transmitted and the times of transmission. Most
vendors have well developed backup and recovery systems and redundant
systems for file storage and communications.[4]

(3) A direct computer-to-computer dial phone connection using
modems is another alternative. This simple system might be effective,
for example, for a school receiving most of its transfer students from a
half-dozen feeder schools. Such a system would not be practical for
exchanges among a large number of schools.

Institutions wanting to use EDI for exchanging academic records
should contact their "trading partners" to be sure that they have the
necessary processes in place to send and receive the electronic
documents. Each campus must be responsible for preparing transcripts in
the SPEEDE format and placing these data within the approved ANSI X12
electronic envelope, and each campus must be connected to the same
network or to networks which are in turn connected by electronic
gateways. Each institution must also have software to read or otherwise
process the received transcripts. In some cases the receiving software
might include public domain programs. 

Members of the SPEEDE task force have agreed that campus-developed 
software for processing EDI transcripts would be considered as public 
domain products and thus freely exchanged without charge. Several 
campuses already have test versions for programs to receive, read, and 
print transcripts. Most software for automatic local processing of 
transcript data into local databases will necessarily be site-specific 
except for some vendor- supplied student information systems or for 
systems shared among institutions.

Summary

Electronic academic records exchange will be the first nationwide
implementation of administrative information exchange among colleges and
universities using ANSI standards for EDI. The adoption of a national
standard format will simplify the exchange of academic records among
many schools throughout the U. S., and merging of ANSI standards with
EDIFACT standards should encourage the international exchange of
transcripts.

Registrars and directors of admissions have an opportunity to
provide leadership within their institutions by demonstrating the full
range of advantages of electronic data interchange in conducting campus
business. Adopting SPEEDE for transcript exchange can help to pave the
way for using EDI in traditional business activities on and between
campuses to reduce data entry errors, business transaction time, and
labor, mail, and data entry costs.

That EDI will become the method of transcript exchange within
higher education is inevitable. EDI's advantages have been proven in
over a decade of use in private industry as well as some colleges and
universities. The question for campuses is not "whether" but "when."
Given its ease of set-up for campuses already on intercampus networks,
its plethora of potential uses outside the admissions office, and
federal regulations that will soon demand it, the answer should be
sooner rather than later.

The SPEEDE Format

SPEEDE files contain an Interchange Control Section that shows that
the file is an academic record, defines the delimiter character, and
records the time and date of the transaction. The control section begins
with the characters "ISA" to say, "This is an academic record." The
fourth character is the delimiter used to separate all data elements in
the transcript. This character is usually a non-printable character and
in printed documents or guidelines may be called by its hexadecimal
representation.

A heading section has the identity of the sending and receiving
institutions. A detail section gives individual course, term, and degree
information. A summary section contains summaries of credits, GPA, and
standardized test scores, if appropriate.

Some elements are required for every transcript and numerous
optional elements are permitted. Each data element is identified as to
what it contains, for example, name of sending institutions, name of
student, course name, grade, credits. Each section and each data element
is identified by a unique code and each section or data element has its
beginning and ending marked with delimiter characters. Each data element
is delimited with the unique character defined in the control section.
Some special codes are required for selected data elements. When
more than one code set may be used among various institutions, there is
also an element to identify the code set being used. An example of a
multiple code set is the numeric code used to identify schools; several
different sources of codes are in wide use.

Some elements have only specific values permitted, some have
maximum lengths, and some permit free-form text and comments. The format
even permits narrative evaluations in place of traditional grades.
Within the flexibility permitted by the ANSI X12 standards, the
AACRAO task force designed the SPEEDE format to place many of the
optional elements at the end of major sections. This placement reduces
the number of characters required in transcripts when the optional
elements are not used.

The SPEEDE format requires internal control elements used by the
sending and receiving software to verify the integrity of the data
transmitted. These checks are independent of the checks required in
transmission protocols such as in TCP/IP. Thus, most EDI transmissions
of academic records using the SPEEDE ANSI X12 standards will have more
than one level of verification for integrity of the transmission.

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SPEEDE-L List Server Available

The list server SPEEDE-L is intended for open discussions and questions
about AACRAO's SPEEDE format for electronic exchange of student
transcripts, including transmission issues, security, public domain
programs to open, read, or print SPEEDE files, promotion of the project,
and other related issues. The list is maintained as a public forum for
help and suggestions, and will serve as one of the "official" means by
which users may propose additions and changes for future revisions of
the standard.

Anyone interested in learning more about the SPEEDE format may join the
list. Subscription commands may vary with operating systems. Check with
your local computing center if you have questions or problems.

On VM/SP systems on the BITNET, enter the following:
TELL LISTSERV AT VTVM1 SUBSCRIBE SPEEDE-L yourname

On VM/SP systems on the Internet, enter the following:
TELL LISTSERV AT VTVM1.CC.VT.EDU SUBSCRIBE SPEEDE-L yourname

On MVS TSO/E systems, use the command TRANSMIT instead of TELL.

On VAX systems, send electronic mail to LISTSERV@VTVM1.BITNET with
the following text:
subscribe SPEEDE-L firstname lastname

As of November 1, 1991, there were 189 subscribers to this list with 128
nodes and nearly as many schools represented. The subscribers are in at
least six countries, including Australia, Canada, Israel, Saudi Arabia,
and Taiwan.

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1  From personal communication with the Electronic Data Interchange
Association, 225 Reinkers Lane, Alexandria, VA 22314; (703) 838-8042.

2  To order additional copies, contact the AACRAO Office, One Dupont
Circle, Suite 330, Washington, DC 20036; phone (202) 293-9161. There is
a charge for more than the single original copy to member institutions.

3  AACRAO Data Dispenser, January 1991, p. 2.

4  An incomplete list of VANs is offered here without implied
endorsement by the author or by CAUSE: AT&T, BT Tymnet, GE Information
Services (GEIS), Infonet, Sterling Software ORDERNET Services Division,
and CompuServ.

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