Collaboration leads to statewide Transferology improvements
In July 2020, Transferology replaced UW Systems’ (UWS) homegrown Transfer Information System (TIS). UW System purchased Transferlolgy as a web-based tool to share transfer credit data among all public colleges and universities in the state and to recruit students from across the country. TIS was limited to sharing freshman/sophomore-level courses and only updated six times per year in a rather labor-intensive process. While this transition was necessary and had many benefits, there were a few features that were lost during this transition. The Office of the Registrar has been working with a developer from Transferology (TFO) to make enhancements to regain some of those features and to expose data in Transferology.
While Transferology exposes a lot more course equivalency information in a much more efficient manner than TIS, one feature it has lacked was the ability to share course attribute data. Information about course attributes such as breadth, level, ethnic studies, and other general education requirements, are of great importance throughout Wisconsin and built into UWS transfer policies. This concern was shared with the vendor by a number of institutions during UWS Transferology Community of Practice, which the vendor still regularly attends. Scott Golueke (Assistant Registrar) presented an idea for exposing course attribute data via the Transfer Rule Extractor (T-Rex) data load along and this past year this was prioritized by the vendor. Scott and Sarah Duford (Course Equivalency Rule Specialist) worked with the developer to test and provide feedback through a few design iterations. Greg Mehlert (DoIT PS developer) assisted with implementing T-Rex and installed many versions of the T-Rex software as new versions were ready for testing.
This work and these developments provide benefits not only for our office, but also benefits to all UW System and Wisconsin Tech College System, as it fulfills an important feature of TIS that was lost in the transition to Transferology – the ability to know which attributes a course satisfies. There are also benefits to students across the country who may want to better understand how their courses transfer to UW–Madison. Additionally, this work fills a deficiency for other colleges who use T-Rex and would like to share course attribute information.
Collaborating with College Source to design, develop, and successfully implement an improvement to Transferology strengthens our vendor/client relationship and may help influence future improvements to this software purchased by UWS to share transfer credit information.