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| Proactively find and research possible course equivalencies by matching
course titles. Search for a transfer college by name. Select a dataset. Select your course description
data set. See the list of courses with matching course titles. Then if you want, create course
equivalencies from that list all at once or one at a time. Equivalency Explorer will be found under
the Advanced Tools menu.
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| Compare an institution's courses from one catalog edition to another. Search
for a college by name. Select two course description data sets such as the 2007-2008 edition and the
2006-2007 edition. Choose a list type: course change, no changes, dropped courses, or new courses. See
your results and view the details if you wish. Course Change Explorer will be found under the Advanced Tools menu.
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| Course list reports may now be copied, editied, and shared among users.
Staff members who evaluate transfer credit have always been able to keep specialized lists of courses
that they regularly use and/or share with students in TES. Now users can copy a list, rename it, edit
it, change its ownership, or simply allow their colleagues to view it.
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| TES now supports the ability to create an equivalency that is hidden from
the free student view (for those who are using it). This is useful in a number of cases. For example,
sometimes an institution will accept either one of two different courses in transfer for a specific
curriculum requirement, but prefer one of the two. To reflect this preference, the user could
create both rules, but hide one. That way, the information is not given out to students who are looking
for equivalencies to use in registration, but the hidden information would be available to staff users
and for students who have already taken courses and need to see how the cedits are transferring (through
the equivalency report).
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| Originally, each equivalency only had one notes field available to users.
A new notes field has been added so that there are now two, one that is visible to the student view
and one that is not. To explain why this is helpful, consider the difference between these notes:
“Fulfills the general studies ‘lab science’ requirement,” and “Students transferring this credit
from Atlantis University are being tracked for success at the next level. Equivalency to be reviewed
in April 09.” The former is helpful information for students. The latter is not, and an institution
would likely want to keep the note for staff viewing only. |
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| Many institutions use “convenience courses” in transfer articulation
that may not actually be taught and do not appear in the institution’s catalog. For instance,
a course like “BIO 1xx” might indicate a 100-level biology elective credit. The TES system now
allows users to quickly add departments and courses to the TES system for use in articulations.
These courses may be created with titles, like “Undistributed Departmental Credit.” Course
descriptions and other data may be attached to these courses as well in order to further explain
their purpose or the type of credit being awarded. |
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Hands down, this is the most exciting new feature in TES.
Course-to-course equivalencies are the lifeblood of transfer, but often they need to be related to each
other in a more meaningful “package” of information for specific academic majors or degree requirements.
In the business of transfer evaluation, these packages of information go by names like “articulation
agreements,” “program articulations,” or “2+2 articulations.”
Now users can, with simple point-and-click operations, create groups of equivalencies and apply helpful
labels to them like “Transfer information for Interior Design Majors” or “Completing the General Studies
requirements.” These reports may be displayed, by label, in the student view. Since groupings are
a collection of course-to-course equivalencies, any change in the base equivalencies are automatically
reflected in the groupings. The groupings can be easily updated, renamed, hidden from the student view,
and the user can attach both public and private notes to them (just as they can for course-to-course
equivalencies).
One useful trick is to create a course-to-course equivalency that only functions as part of a program
articulation, hide it from the student view, but then add it to the appropriate group. Now the equivalency
will be hidden from the general pile of transfer information, but visible to students using the grouping as
a guide for transfer. |
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The export report allows users to quickly get an extract of their equivalency rules in Excel (.XLS),
XML, or tab-delimited text (.TXT) formats. Users at the administrative level simply click a button
to get a report any time they want. The format of the export also reflects the format by which equivalencies
can be imported to TES. This means a new level of integration is possible between TES and any student
information system, legacy or licensed, mainframe or client-server based!
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We are really excited by some of the features we have planned
to further refine our TES service. The biggest project on the table for the next quarter are
equivalency “migration” tools. The migration tools will allow users to quickly copy equivalencies to other
catalog years that contain the exact same courses. No more comparing catalogs! This tool will search out
other instances of the same courses at the sending and receiving institutions and allow users to create
the appropriate equivalencies in one click.
Other possibilities for this quarter include an engine for reversing and reviewing equivalencies and
the rollout of advanced search capabilities and more edition-to-edition catalog comparison utilities. |
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| Please drop us a line and let us know how we are doing. Our goal
is to provide useful, streamlined, time-saving tools for people with too much on their plates!
Your comments, positive or negative, help us achieve that goal. Send your feedback via our
contact us form, or call us at 1-800-854-2670
x333. |
EQUIVALENCY EXPLORER