Transfer Articulation: A Homegrown System That Does

What Some Said Couldn’t be Done

Casey Bullock & Aaron GarzaWeber State University

Weber State University● ~30,000 students● ~20,000 new articulations per year (some years up to 30,000)

● All transfer courses articulated (regionally accredited)

● Articulation decisions made by academic departments (unless no equivalent department)

● Contracting with TES (Transfer Evaluation Services) for course descriptions access only

● Banner Student 8.13, moving to Banner 9 soon ● UC4 used for job process automation

A History of New Articulation Processes at WSU

Centralized Articulation Chaos, in Admissions

MS Excel -Flashdrives

MS Excel -Email

Google Sheets (in the cloud)

Automated App through eWeber portal

Departmental Decision Era

All old articulations from centralized era erased from database.

Transcripting done in Admissions, but new articulations handled by Registrar’s Office.

Memo of understanding with College Deans that articulation decisions done by academic departments must be submitted to Registrar’s Office within 5 days.

Articulating New Courses - Fundamental Needs:● Course information entry (e.g. description & catalog year) ● Alternative processing, if no course information is found● Decision-point processes

○ Who does it go to to make the final articulation?○ What is the final articulation?

● Update the student in the database● Update the database articulation tables with the new

articulation● Recording of who made articulation decision and when

Articulating New Courses - Fundamental Wants:

● Email notifications to articulator in academic department● Escalating email notifications if articulator doesn’t do it● Email notifications to students● Redirect to a different department, if necessary● Dealing with duplicate courses● Ability to cancel a course out of the process● Searchable Archive● Alternate articulation request method for non-students● Analytics

SHATAEQ● Student’s transfer courses

entered on the left● If articulation already in tables it

shows up on the right● ELEC REV - manually entered

for new courses not already in tables

○ Rolled to History○ Shows in degree audit○ Allows for students and

advisors to know what is still under review

● ELEC REV triggers the course to be sent to our system

UNDERSTANDING TABLES - the key to it allBanner screens are just the public face of the information in the Banner tables, putting information into the tables and displaying information that is already there

Tables are like spreadsheets that store all of the information in Banner, and every piece of data has a location (similar to cell location in spreadsheets: e.g. “A7”).

The various processes our programmers wrote find and copy data between existing Banner tables and new custom Oracle tables that they created, and vice versa.

Our Transfer Articulation Portal Apps are the public face of the information in the new custom Oracle tables.

PORTAL APP

(.NET)

BANNER TABLES

CUSTOMORACLETABLES

PACKAGESPROCEDURES

FUNCTIONSSQL QUERIESUC4 PROCESS

ELEC REV

Sent nightly to tables behind Portal App

We enter course info & assigns to Dept (MANUAL)

If no course info found, ELEC REV changed to ELEC 1TTT after 30 days, but student can submit info to re-initiate.

Department decision

Send to other dept

Send back to our office asking in Additional Comment section for more info

Articulate

Choose one

We review & finalize (“Big Red Button”)

Articulation added to tables

Student’s ELEC REV changed to articulation

= Email Notification

Transfer Articulation Apps in eWeber Portal

Equivalency Review Request

● Through our Transfer website , an articulation request can be made by anyone.○ Students at other institutions wanting to know how their

courses will transfer■ If course(s) not existing already in Transfer Guide

○ Weber students looking for courses they can take elsewhere and bring back here

○ Academic Advisors

CRUCIAL DISCOVERIES

● The tables behind SHATAEQ are different from the tables behind SHATRNS. ○ Writing directly to SHATRNS tables was the key to

allow courses to stay as “Rolled to History”■ No need to “Delete from History” first in order to

update from ELEC REV to the new articulation.● Need to find dirty data entered manually during

transcripting - scheduled reports

Future Goals:

● Increase analytics○ for example, average time taken by articulators

● Re-evaluate possible use of many-to-one & many-to-many articulation groupings

● Evaluate possible use of auto-expiration & inactivation of articulations

Many thanks to:

● Fran Hopkin, once from Weber, but now the King in the North (USU-Logan)● Ruth Little, Grand Master of Weber’s Transfer Articulation processes● Cary Chapman, Programming Prince of Tables and Procedures● Christian Goodrich, Programming Prince of .NET and Portal apps● Marty Carver, Banner and UC4 Yoda (“Do or do not. There is no ‘try’.)● Roy Bradburn, Project Shepherd/Herder of Cats