A Service to Support Individual Learners as Lifelong Clients

The Vision

Overview A national partnership is proposed to facilitate the establishment of distributed but interlinked repositories of individually-owned portfolio data and to adopt or evolve actual and de facto standards in support of data interchange, storage, access, security, confidentiality, and privacy. The objective is to enable individuals throughout their student and work careers to maintain and control up-to-date educational, demographic, professional work experience, and personal information in a consolidated portfolio; and electronically to provide pertinent information to a wide range of institutions, organizations and corporations with the consent of the owner. The portfolio would start to accumulate in the 9th grade. The initial partnership proposes to join forces with appropriate commerial or not-for-profit organizations to establish or contract for model or "certified" repositories that meet defined criteria regarding standards of security, privacy, authentication, and confidentiality, as well as meeting model contractual terms and conditions. Rationale. Two common themes in the literature and press in recent years have been the failure of (higher) education to view the student as a client and to be insular and resistant to the concepts and practices commonly employed by private sector industry. An example of this is that today students typically fill out individual admissions application forms for each institution, often repeating much of the same data. Some commercial firms are attempting to streamline this process by inviting the students to make one application electronically, and then re-use common data in other electronic applications to institutions who are customers of that commercial service. Unfortunately, this approach is creating electronic islands of student data that are not readily portable to other repositories. By contrast, we propose the creation of portable lifelong portfolios owned by the individual and stored at repositories of choice that can change according to owner choice and marketplace availability. By virtue of being focused on the information needs of the individual as the client - from junior high-schooler to lifelong learner and worker - this nationwide undertaking is not intended to be institution-specific, in contrast with most of today's systems. Nevertheless, the proposed approach will provide the foundation upon which institutions of higher education and other organizations can develop new and more efficient ways of performing a wide range of administrative functions and services involving the collection and processing of information from individual learners, such as is required for admissions or financial aid, and the dissemination of institutional information to them - such as the provision of transcripts and dissemination of job opportunities. This initiative is intended as a complement to campus systems. For example, an online campus admission system, whether operated by a campus itself or by a service provider, would utilize data from the repository to populate the application. Transcript data would be exchanged among participating sites via Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), using X.12 standards. Scope. In the long range this nationwide undertaking can be viewed as consisting of a number of components and functions that would become the lifelong repository for a wide range of information associated with each individual. In its initial start-up phase the primary purpose would be to provide individuals an opportunity to build a personal educational and demographic portfolio and a chance to interact with higher education institutions nationwide and those related agencies and organizations such as the US Department of Education and College Board. Institutional admissions systems, for example, could, with appropriate student or parental, as appropriate, permission, draw on this portfolio as needed. Interlinked repositories would also serve as a filter, perhaps providing for a fee to various organizations and institutions that would benefit from access to repository data - for example, outreach offices of higher education institutions, granting organizations, or potential employers - who would "mine" the data for profiles that meet specific needs. Unless the portfolio owner indicates otherwise, the relevant portfolio data would only be provided anonymously. Further follow-up contact would only be provided with permission of the owner. Such a service would provide a vehicle for the portfolio owners to authorize various levels of access to their data. The learner (or in some cases the parent) would be the owner of all data relating to her/him and as such would be the authorizing agent. Participants and Beneficiaries. The service can be viewed from various perspectives, including: The clients: What it is from the eyes of the individual who maintains her/his i ndividual records with this service. Individual learners (portfolio owners) will be well served by having one location in which all their educational, work experience, and demographic/personal records are stored over their entire lifetimes. This would avoid, for example, individuals having to request transcripts separately from all schools they attend; under the proposed model they would go one place for all transcript information, information that is electronically authenticated by the institutions they have attended. Similarly, individuals would have one secure location in which to store lifelong information about themselves - not only coursework completed, degrees received and grades, but information on accomplishments, extracurricular activities, test scores, and ultimately their employment experiences, including letters of recommendation. They would be able to view information stored about themselves to assure that it is accurate, complete, and up to date. They would also have one location and one set of data which would be used by institutions for use in admission applications and many other functions such as financial aid, housing, matriculation services, advising services and degree audit systems. As the learner moves through life, the same information can be used as a basis for electronically building resumes for job applications. Likewise, later in life it would serve as the repository for information about their work experiences and educational and other achievements. Such functionality would avoid having to supply their demographic information separately to many different institutions, or to the same institution multiple times. Similarly, the learner clients would be able to authorize access to their personal information by organizations looking for students meeting particular scholarship criteria, or by institutions wishing to reach out to a certain type of student or by future employers seeking candidates with particular backgrounds. User Entities: What it is from the eyes of institutions and organizations as information consumers Higher educational institutions are looking for ways to become more client centered and to reduce administrative costs by being able to quickly integrate an individual's information into one academic portfolio. The same institutions are also looking for an easy way to provide information about themselves to prospective students and to reach out to them earlier in the educational career of these individuals. In the case of building an integrated student record for each individual prospect, the challenge to the institutions cannot be accomplished entirely from within. For example, if higher education institutions continue to receive hard copy transcript information from high schools for undergraduate institutions, efforts to streamline and mechanize admission processing will continue to be severely hampered. The same is true at the graduate level. This nationwide service would result in the ability of these institutions to be provided machine readable transcript information not in hardcopy but by using pointers in student records which provide links to the schools' electronic transcripts. Such information could assist institutions greatly as they struggle for means of reengineering manual admission processes based on outdated industrial record-keeping models. Likewise, for institutions which are developing on-line admission applications, having one source for obtaining much student information provides for more prompt, accurate data and a more student friendly environment, eliminating the request that students supply over and over again the same information to many different institutions. For institutions which would like to purchase modern, network-based admission application processes, they would be able to achieve these same benefits through vendor developed software which accesses portfolio data. Because nothing in the service is institution specific, participating institutions need not reinvent their processes or systems to gain advantage; their existing initiatives and innovations can work with this new service offering. In the long range, access to portfolio contents - particularly where such information is stored at "certified" repositories - could, optionally, also relieve institutions of the obligation to maintain records of students once they graduate. The availability of a secure location in which to store and service the needs for access to these institutional records will provide an opportunity to review the most cost effective long term data storage needs. At the same time, it enables the individual to maintain a consolidated individual portfolio. Government Providers: What it is from the eyes of States acting as financial resource providers States wishing to help primary and secondary schools concentrate on their education mission and relieve them of the administrative burden of student recordkeeping could contract to store student scholarship information in "certified" repositories. Similarly States pursuing virtual institutions need to find cost effective means of handling student outreach, admission, registration and transcript functions for students who may never physically visit a physical institution from which they are receiving education. Private Enterprise Providers: What it is from the eyes of existing and future enterprises who provide student services Existing and future organizations can build new business opportunities and services: creating and storing student portfolios (certified or otherwise), providing value-added tools for capture of and access to such stored data, or providing value-added services to students, institutions, granting foundations, potential employers etc.. For example, being able to utilize for a fee the names and addresses of individuals who have agreed to be contacted for potential educational or scholarship opportunities provides the ability to serve various commercial and educational partners. Institutions could themselves, or they could contract with a service provider to, identify targeted students meeting particular criteria. Such individuals could then be contacted for special outreach activities and scholarship opportunities. Similarly, employers could use the service to identify potential employees, first identifying anonymously individuals meeting their selection criteria and then, second, contacting those individuals who authorize release of their personally identifiable information.