A new national initiative that includes the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) aims to use artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the credit transfer process that will ultimately benefit students.
The process of transferring from two-year to four-year institutions can be daunting for community college students, particularly for first-generation students of color. Whether the receiving four-year institution accepts transferring students’ community college credits can be especially stressful. The AI Transfer and Articulation Infrastructure Network (ATAIN) looks to tap technology to streamline that process and provide more certainty.
In particular, ATAIN aims to:
- Provide a smoother transfer experience for all learners and reduce credit loss.
- Increase the number of learners transferring in and/or out of participating institutions.
- Increase enrollment and on-time degree completion for students.
- Equip student-facing staff and faculty with more time to engage with learners in meaningful ways.
- Enhance institutional processes and efficiency.
- Reduce institutional costs.
With support from the College Futures Foundation, the consortium of higher education professionals involved in ATAIN include: AACC; Zach Pardos, associate professor of education and director of the University of California, Berkeley’s Computational Approaches to Human Learning Research Lab; the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities; and Sova, a higher education and workforce development consultant.
Pardos has developed the CourseWise platform that will drive the project, which will pull information from participating colleges’ and universities’ course catalog descriptions, course articulations, enrollments and more into an AI-assistive methodology. Participating colleges will be able to see analytics on key elements — such as the number of courses articulated, credits awarded, a rating on inefficient equivalencies and more — and gauge how consistent or inconsistent institutional policies are, Pardos said during an informational webinar on the project held on Thursday.
Pardos has been studying AI in higher education since 2013, and on AI for articulation and transfer since 2015. In 2019, his lab began AI-for-transfer collaborations with Laney College in Oakland, California, and the City University of New York and State University of New York systems. The experiences from those projects and others have informed the development of the ATAIN initiative, he said.
Seeking participants
Community colleges and universities can apply to join the inaugural cohort of ATAIN.
Selected participants will have access to technology and direct support while building AI-powered course equivalency database, transcript evaluation workflows and dashboards for training articulation coverage. Future enhancements will include personalized program-mapping for students and course selection guidance for learners and interoperability with other articulation data systems.
“It’s a really exciting combination of features,” said Sova’s Lara Couturier.
Applications are due January 24. Selected participants will be announced in February. Roughly 60 institutions will participate in the first cohort.
