Top of Mind with Tambellini Group
Top of Mind with Tambellini Group
The Power and Value of Building a Comprehensive Learner Record
Is a transcript the best way to truly reflect a student's academic learning experience? Temple University’s registrar Bhavesh Bambhrolia believes that while the traditional transcript is safe and secure, it is limiting in communicating a student's growth and development from a cumulative experience. In this Top of Mind episode, Bambhrolia gives listeners a glimpse into an emerging generational tool for tracking the student experience—the Comprehensive Learner Record (CLR).
Hello, and welcome to the February episode of Tambellini Group's Top of Mind Podcast. I'm your host Liz Farrell. In this episode, we're talking about a topic continues to gain a lot of attention in the higher ed market. The comprehensive learner record. It is a topic that is so important because we know that institutions are always eager to find new and more effective ways to communicate the value a nd relevance of their degrees, to the students who earn them and the organizations looking to employ their graduates. Today, we're lucky e nough t o be joined by BhaBhavesh Bambhrolia who serves as registrar at Temple University in Philadelphia. Bhavesh has been with Temple for nine years, overseeing quite the plethora of large-scale modernization efforts across Temple's 17 schools and colleges, which have a combined total of 37,000 undergrad and grad students in this role. He is also in the midst of leading a project to implement a comprehensive learner record at his institution. Welcome, Bhavesh.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Happy to be here.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for joining us. I'm especially intrigued to talk with you today because as you know, higher education is still in the early days of building and using continuous learning records, CLRs as they're sometimes called. And you are one of the pioneers leading a project on this at your institution. So while we certainly have plenty to discuss about what's going on in Temple, I'd like our listeners to have the proper context for understanding exactly what a CLR does and how it's implemented. And to do that, I think we need to rewind and start talking about your role as registrar at Temple. Now, when I was in college, a while back, the registrar was the place you had to bring your signed paper forms to change your courses, or get an exemption waved for a prerequisite, and clearly, a lot has changed since then. So with that in mind, how would you describe your role as registrar?
Speaker 2:So at Temple University, the Office of the University Registrar is part of the enrollment management division, which reports into the Provost Office. When I first started at Temple, one of the things that we wanted to do was to make sure that our work was purpose driven. So we prioritized our work around compliance, which is one of the mandates of our office and customer service. Making sure that we serve our schools and colleges in a way that supports— in a way that they are supported— so that they can make sure that the, their students have the best experience within the programs that they offer. We approach our projects from efficiency perspective, and focus on designing our systems to have the policy requirements built right into them. That way students don't necessarily need to know what the policy is to interact with our services because we rely heavily on data to present contextual information that is relevant to them. A couple of examples that we can think of—that I can think of—are like we built a communication stream for priority registration based on different levels of students and other attributes, like credit hours, GPA, graduation, eligibility, and other features o f the student, to make it easy for them to understand what actions to take. And when t he idea is to distill the nuances of a policy i nto an algorithm, as much as possible to simplify decision making,
Speaker 1:You make it sound easy, but I think you had mentioned that these communication streams had something like 30 to 40,000 different paths or messages on them that could be personalized for students.
Speaker 2:Yes, when we take the total number of total number of combinations of the different data point, it did yield to a large volume of combination like 30 to 40,000 different combinations.
Speaker 1:Well, it's great to have vastly simplified the process for students. I imagine, instead of, you know, again, thinking back to my experience, having to look through these thick five inch book, the course catalogs to figure out what course I needed to take when, and if it was going to be available. Um, and it's great to have these type of modernizations, which I understand from talking with you or took many years to, to get up to a point where they're running smoothly. Um, but it's still quite challenging at so many institutions for students to navigate course requirements and stay on track to graduations and let alone figure out how their chosen major or degree translates into a relevant career path. And these amenities aren't as common as they should be. A lot of institutions are not in the place that Temple is right now. So on top of doing all those other things, students are still struggling to figure out when they have these rich skills and experiences that they've gained over their undergraduate or even graduate years and how they translate those into bullet points for their resume or talking points for an interview, which brings us to the comprehensive learner record or CLR. And I hadn't realized before we discussed your work, that there is an actual official definition of a CLR that AACRAO has created. For those of you not familiar with that acronym, it's for the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. Quite a mouthful. So Bhavesh, before we get into how the CLR works at Temple, can you enlighten our listeners on that common definition of a CLR and how it came to be?
Speaker 2:Sure. So AACRAO, along with the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, started the foundational work, along with The Lumina Foundation in 2015 to bring prominence to the forefront about CLR. The definition of a CLR is one that says that a document that captures relevant data to visually present and communicate the learning and skills acquired by a student through their higher education experience. Uh, this includes learning from courses as well as experiences they have beyond the classroom that help develop their career-ready, skills and abilities, including student activities, campus, employment, internships, and externships, as well as study abroad and any other, co-curricular activity that contribute to students development. And then once AACRAO and others formalized the definition, the work really started to elevate the CLR to a degree of prominence where institutions like us, Temple University, and Elon, Loma Linda, University of Maryland, and others could start pursue CLR initiatives with support from AACRAO and another organization. IMS global. IMS global released the IMS CLR standards, which is an interruptable learner record structure to support wide range of use cases for the CLR. IMS global develops open interoperability standards. They support adoption, with implementation resources, that encourages adoption through their programs that highlight effective practices in areas of learning and credentialing, and CLR standards fall within their digital credential ecosystem.
Speaker 1:So we can definitely say that getting to the point of codifying this definition of a CLR was a group effort that took time, and a lot of input from various organizations, both within and outside of academe. Bhavesh, I've also heard you describe the CLR—and I love this description of it—as it doesn't replace, a student's traditional academic transcript, but augments it. And can you explain to us what you mean by that? Because I think it goes a long way to illuminating for our listeners what a CLR is and does.
Speaker 2:Sure. Uh, so the distinction is that we think of the transcript as an official academic record and it will always remain the official academic record, meaning reporting your grades. The overarching goal that we have for our CLR is to tell a story that exemplifies our learner success and illuminates their interest beyond their grades and courses, completed, thus, fully reflecting their growth and development from their cumulative Temple experience. So the academic transcript is just the grades and the CLR i s augmenting that with additional c ontext beyond the grades. Specifically our CLR shows a summary of skills acquired from courses. Sp ecific courses that contributed to those skills as skills gained from the general education program a n d experiences from participating in campus organization activities, internships and other external o p portunities, o n ca mpus e mployment, a n d global experience such as study abroad or study aw ay, b a d ges earned, an d credential details up o n gr a duation. The CLR is intended to provide benefits to the consumers. The three consumers potentially could be one, a student who will find value in reflecting on their accomplishments and having a visual validated record beyond the transcript that conveys what they learned and the skills they acquired. An employer as a consumer finds of value in gaining a 360 perspective about the learner and how the skills they've gained relate to jobs that they might be a pplying for. And t hen parents and families c an take a look at the CLR and understand the value of Temple experience.
Speaker 1:I mean, those are all definite benefits that I think a lot of people are trying to show through their degrees and the value, and it can often be hard to show them, um, speaking of which we're not in a visual medium here, and we can't show what this looks like visually, but through words, can you share with us how CLRs work with some of the types of technology like AI and automated scans that are employers are using to identify talent? I think this is so cool. And when you explain this to me the light bulb went off on what exactly these are and do. So.
Speaker 2:Sure. So the CLR is a digital credential that a student owns and it can be shared with employers or any third-party agent, and because the CLR follows the IMS CLR standard, the data is machine consumable or machine readable. The talent acquisition or talent management tools can consume the CLR data, which can then be used in variety ways, such as talent mining for new employees, talent pooling, or team building within an organization, uh, and retention management within an organization. IMS Global as a wellsprining initiative is a good example, which the initiative seeks to bridge the gap between educational institution and workplace using open standard skills framework and verify verifiable credentials, such as the CLR. So with using the wellspring initiative, employers can look for prospective employees to say, these are the skills that I'm I'm looking for, or these are, I'm looking for employees who have taken these particular courses. And because the CLR has that data embedded in it, the student with that data shows up as a prospect.
Speaker 1:And that's just a brilliant sort of reverse engineering in a way to show that direct relevance taking some of that guesswork out of it for the student and the employer. Um, I do imagine though, despite the, the elegance of this is a solution that it takes a while to get a CLR up and running, and the hardest part of any project as we all know is getting started. So how did you go about launching this project at Temple and how long have you been working on it?
Speaker 2:Um, so it starts, started with a proposal and communicating the value within the proposal. And after sharing the proposal, the value was cleared. It was accepted, then we designed a project so that it wouldn't be resource intensive on other academic units. A lot of times with large scale projects like this, there can be pushback because of the changes that would have to be made up. But our team within the registrar's office, uh, was, uh, dedicated, was dedicated to developing all of the backend and doing the technical work. So the other divisions wouldn't have to, uh, pull in their resource. Essentially we told the other divisions, we just need help with, uh, uh, help up to access their data that we need for the project. And beyond that, there wouldn't be much for them to do. Uh, we also signed up to be a charter member with Parchment, so we could influence how, this was built and developed. So it would align with our digital, credential strategy. In terms of reaching out to a partner, we reached out to the Fox School of Business, and they were a very willing partner. And we started this initiative back in 2019. Learners within the Fox School of Business have a very distinct experience that differ from college of engineering or the school of music. Within the Fox School of Business, they already have a very robust experiencial program for their student. They include issuing badges, which meant that they had a lot of the input that we need for plugging into the CLR. And this made them an ideal partner for launching the CLR.
Speaker 1:So you get this internal buy-in and consensus. You've got your launching partner. Then who doeswhat? What happens then?
Speaker 2:Uh, so we work with Fox leadership to get the data that we would need, such as the mapping out the courses to the experience and the skills. Then we started also having philosophical discussions with not only Fox, but undergraduate studies and others about the value of the CLR. Why should we not include particular elements as data inputs? How do we account for variation, various situations such as transfers. And then in terms of the other inputs, uh, numerous offices were involved the registrar's office is responsible for aggregating the input and generating the output— sort of like the traffic controller—we're managing the integrity of the process thatprovides inputs and generates the output, and the inputs or data are managed by individual units own that data. So student affairs is responsible for student activities and clubs. And for that, we built integration with Campus Lab. Career services is responsible for internships and externships. And for that, we are getting data from Handshake, and HR is responsible for on campus employment and that data's coming from Banner. And then individual schools and colleges are responsible for how their courses align with outcomes and outcomes or skills for which we could build custom data models to feed the CLR.
Speaker 1:It's a lot of coordination across a lot of groups. So, I know this is still in process and in the early stages there. Where are you at in the project now, and what are your immediate plans say for the next six months or year?
Speaker 2:So, uh, we have built out the data infrastructure with integration to the various platform. And within the next couple of weeks, we'll be testing the integrity of the data inputs and the output. Our test group will consist of a few hundred currently enrolled Fox students. And then, we are aiming to go live, later this semester. And even after going live, we're gonna continue to refine and thinking about scalability. So that future projects to build this out for other schools and colleges will be less resource intensive, and then finding more ways to make it scalable for other colleges within Temple, just beyond Fox, and looking at those particular colleges and their unique needs. Looking ahead, we're planning to issue your CLR to limited number of students in the school of business this April or maybe sooner. We're going to start with seniors because we have four years worth of their data to build upon. And then, after having issued the CLRs to them, we're going to be taking a look at the feedback from the students and how they're using it—if they're sharing it with employers, looking at feedback from the marketplace, how it's accepted from prospective employers. So that's all very important, but the goal is to make it accessible to all Fox students as early as possible. So this project, even even further out this project is one of continuous improvement. And because we're because it entails machine readable data, we're always looking to see how algorithms are used to source talent, and then finding ways to make this make the CLR consumable for those purposes. Um, so if we kind of think about resumes and how they used to be formatted and shared even decades ago, it's changed so much. So now, talent pooling or talent acquisition has been refined down to algorithms. Um, so we think that this is going to be an ideal tool to give our students a competitive advantage.
Speaker 1:You had also mentioned to me that this has changed a bit of the story around recruiting for perspective students.
Speaker 2:Yes. So as a recruitment tool, um, it does change the conversation about the value of Temple degree to prospective students and parents. And so what the CLR does convey is it's not just coming in and taking classes and getting grades it's about real-world skills that students can obtain from the classes as well as other experiences and opportunities that students can pursue. And those all translate into value that they can promote beyond Temple.
Speaker 1:It's again, when we're living in an age where accountability and showing value of a degree is of paramount priority, the value of this is so clear. From what you're saying about the plans currently, and for the future, I know you had also mentioned that the ways employers search for talent these days is constantly evolving and iterating. So it's definitely not as with any modernization product, not just about the upfront effort to get it off the ground, but the continuous effort to improve and iterate. One thing that I found exceptional about your efforts thus far is that they seem to be progressing quite smoothly and according to schedule, and even more miraculously, you and your team started this project in late 2019, right before the pandemic began. So needless to say, that's quite different from what I typically hear when talking of leaders serving as early adopters on massive technology projects, especially given all the drastic and sudden disruptions to higher education over the past two years. So I think it could be tempting for the uninitiated uninitiated like me to assume that these projects are easy, but clearly there was a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes to get Temple to a place where it was even feasible to continue undertake, to consider rather undertaking this project. So if you think back to the six years you spent at Temple as registrar, prior to embarking on this CLR journey in 2019, what did you and your team accomplished during that time span that made it possible to get this off the ground and just keep it moving ahead.
Speaker 2:Um, so it all starts with being purpose-driven and prioritizing, and what's the most important thing that we need to do first. CLR is a very ambitious project. And if it had been around in 2014, there was no way we could have undertaken it because there was other things that we had to prioritize. So if we think about, technology infrastructure as a house, you shouldn't focus on say building a new sunroom if there's a leaky roof. So we h ad to fix the leaky roof, u h, before we can embark on anything i s a s ambitious as a CLR, we had a lot of modernization that had to be done. And so we wanted to focus on that first and get rid of all of our antiquated paper process.
Speaker 1:So that leads me into the next question, which is where were those leaky routes? It certainly sounds like paper was one of the big ones.
Speaker 2:Yes, our priority has always been to increase efficiency for our users, advisors who connect with us for our services, students who connect with us for our services. And we had a lot of work to do to make our operations, run smoothly and increase efficiency as much as possible. We had a lot of manual pape-based processes that were complex to navigate. So we needed to make them easier for everyone. Examples, some examples of what we automated include like the change of program, leave of absence. Even our transcript and diploma request services are pretty intelligent. Name changes, not only within registrar's office, but with the HR as well. So like looking at processes that are systemic rather than just one-off silo. Our veteran education benefit management was a huge undertaking. And then just some examples essentially, you know, when we look at our operation, we are thinking about the outcome is based on some decision points based on data. So we wanted to eliminate decision making by reducing it, reducing the decision-making to an algorithm and through data. So we worked on, as we were pursuing these initiatives, we also worked on some experimental projects using data into different capacities, such as machine learning and chatbots that we could potentially use in the future to support our operation. And we described this as a paradigm shift that instead of managing the processing of transactions, we are managing the process. And the result now is that we are fully online service. We reduced processing time, transactional time, decision-making time. We practically eliminated visits to our office. And today over 80% of our transactions are automated.
Speaker 1:That's, it's a goal that I'm sure many aspire to but fall short of and getting to that point is quite impressive. Um, I'm sure anyone who has attempted such grand scale modernization efforts will surely recognize that getting to the results you've achieved takes a significant long term commitment. Um, it requires all these data permissions building automated processes, as you mentioned, doing a lot of experimenting, um, and doing that across every division that the registrar office registrar's office touches. So it's safe to say that many institutions are far behind. Um, but actually with that in mind, I thought we could include our discussion today with you sharing your advice for other institutions that are consider considering adding a CLR, they may not be able to get to what is sounds to me like a gold standard that you all have at your institution, but how far along do they need to be for this to be a feasible project, because it's quite an ambitious and any other tips you also have for how they might wanna approach it?
Speaker 2:Sure. So, it's important to keep in mind that what we've done, even before starting the CLR, some background work. doing the research, and making sure that if you are gonna institutions that are taking on this project, uh, they do have t he support. Um, s o by the time we got around to it, we were very confident that we had a very solid project. We didn't have anything else to worry about other than this as a major initiative, because all the other things that were critical, we're a lready ta ken c are of fr om y ears of improvement. So being in a good pl ace i s, I think, it's important so that it doesn't weigh in on, or doesn't creep in on the project, on t he CLR project, as you're pursuing the project is i mportant to, m ake sure that there's executive support, m e a ning that the re it's an initiative that is not just coming from the office, but there's executive lev el su pport—VP-level support. And without that, there could be an issue of priority. So, you know, while the CLR is a priority for for the office, it not be a priority for another office that is required to provide data or something else. And so, the next thing is making sure that the vendor that you're working with shares your value. The last thing that you want is a vendor who is not able to support your vision, where you end up falling into the vision they have for their product instead of what your institution wants to have for the CLR. And that is to explore any opportunity. For our project, we selected Parchment. We've been with Parchment before quite some time, and they fit with our digital credential strategy,, which is to explore opportunities that promote and places Temple students at a competitive advantage in the marketplace where student record is, uh, considered, um, and then developing a CLR with the purpose is really important, uh, rather than just doing it because other institutions are doing it. For instance, a lot of institutions have robust co-curricular and experiential programs that are already embedded in their degree pathways. And that's critical because CLR should be designed with intention of telling the story, of the value of the learner's experience and the degree. That's in terms of starting out once some of those frameworks are in place in terms of starting out, it's important to identify one key partner who will champion the effort. Like in our case, it was Fox School of Business. And then once we have the entire CLR done with Fox, then we can expand to other schools. Then by starting out with one school and going through the process and building it, we're going to learn so much along the way, especially as a large institution and that will help us in terms of scaling for the other academic programs as well as unique experiences that the other schools and colleges offer. But if we were to wait until all the schools and colleges are already, the project would be so that it would never get off the ground. There would be too many. We would get pulled into too many different directions instead of focusing on one, the next thing is of course, talking to other institutions, learn from their experiences and how to avoid common mistakes. Learn about what they did and what you can do better. It's always important that you know, you find value in what others are doing, but synthesize value to your own or organizational goals. And then, once it's implemented, focus on continuous improvement and always be looking for what can be improved to do better or differently, and how the CLR can continuously evolve to meet the changing market needs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's certainly a recurrent theme in our conversation here. And I think through a lot of modernization projects where these aren't something with an endpoint, there are things where you're going to be continuously dealing with new updates, new tools, and new ways that you can figure it to, to meet your institution's needs and your learner's needs. But it's also quite evident that there's so much value to be gained for an institution students. And I would say even the economy at large when institutions like Temple put this type of time and effort to make these ideas into a reality for their students. Bhavesh, you've certainly provided us with a lot of inspiration and food for thought today. Thanks so much for sharing your insights and journey thus far with our listeners.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Well, that concludes this month episode of Tambellini's Top of Mind Podcast. Don't forget to check out all of our episodes, blogs, and resources at thetambellinigroup.com.