AwardED™

Reverse Transfer System
THE CHALLENGE:

Given the complexity and limitations of higher education student information systems and data transfer, how can we as a state best implement our reverse transfer initiatives and realize our degree attainment goals awarding students credit when it’s due?

AcademyOne’s AwardED™ reverse transfer solution provides a framework that automates and bridges the data exchange and degree audit processes between institutions. Our robust workflows relieve your faculty and staff of the manual and laborious efforts that bring about unnecessary administrative burdens.

How it Works

AwardED™ notifies potential completers to opt-in, uploads course histories of consenting students, and matches their courses with program requirements to pre-determine students who have met, or are close to meeting, the requisites for an associate degree.

ID Potentially Eligible Students

Our reverse transfer system queries the databases of your participating four-year institutions to identify eligible students based on agreed upon criteria and uploads them.

Optimize Data Exchange

Our system allows for the secure, efficient, and sustainable exchange of course and credit data assimilated from multiple student information systems across your two-year and four-year public and private institutions.

Maintain FERPA Compliance

After eligible students are uploaded into the system, opt-in email requests are routinely sent for optimal outreach and higher consensus rates triggered by awareness.

Systematize Degree Audits

Give your institutions access to a centralized technology platform and course equivalency system to automate and streamline their reverse transfer evaluation processes and maximize capacity.

Engage, Advise, and Award

Your institutions can pinpoint and notify students who have met all the requirements to be conferred an associate degree. And they can identify near-completers who are within a few credits of receiving a degree to communicate those requirements and keep them in the opt-in cycle.

Informative Reporting

System and institution- level reports fuel process-focused research and show the long-term value and impact of your state’s reverse transfer initiatives. Highlight the importance of transfer articulation collaborations between your institutions who have competing priorities.

Who Benefits?

Our clients who have implemented AwardED™ see benefits for everyone involved and an immediate return on their investment. A higher degree attainment rate meets 21st century state workforce demand boosting the economy. Students can combine the credits they have earned to be awarded an associate degree while working toward their baccalaureate providing them a credential that is valuable in the labor market. Institutions have reduced their manual workload resulting in higher productivity and reduced operating costs.

What People Are Saying

What are our valuable customers saying about us?

One of the questions we are always asked is why did you go with an outside vendor? We knew that we had the technical resources across the state to write the software in-house, but we also realized that those people had full-time jobs doing other things that might take higher priority. Most recently a study looking at the involvement of ours that it takes to process a degree audit manually factoring in the average salary of a graduation audit analyst here in Tennessee showed that there was a ROI of a little over $111,000 after one semester.

Gloria Gammell Institute for Higher Education Policy Consultant, and former University of Tennessee Director of Statewide Initiatives

The Reverse Transfer initiative is a definite ‘win-win.’ Students may not be aware that credits earned after transfer from a two-year college can help round out their associate degree requirements. For transfer students, a reverse degree award provides a well-deserved stamp of accomplishment and appears to be a motivating factor to finish the 4-year degree. On the institutional side, both community colleges and 4-year universities stand to benefit from the impact of this initiative on graduation rates, measures that feed into the state funding formula and national rankings.

Dr. India Lane Associate Dean of Academic and Student Affairs, University of Tennessee