Course Transfer Articulation Module -
the DARS Design

Overview

The design of  the DARS articulation module has taken into account the AACRAO electronic transcript format designed by the Task Force on the Standardization of Postsecondary Education Electronic Data Exchange - or SPEEDE for short. Many of the course data fields introduced by the SPEEDE standards are supported within DARS.

The system design provides a “seamless” internal connection between the results of the automatic transfer course evaluation (one or more institutions at the same time) and courses taken at the receiving institution with the preparation of a DARS degree audit. This design approach enables a (prospective) student to have transfer courses (received, electronically from another institution, or by paper transcript), evaluated in terms of the receiving institution's courses or requirements, and then displayed in an audit report showing not only how those courses will be accepted, but also applied within a program at the receiving institution. Reports can be distributed to the student over the Web, by electronic mail, or by more traditional methods.   As an aside, this concept is being implemented as the Course Applicability System (CAS) with the additional option that the student can build and maintain their own course portfolio and have them evaluated by one or more institutions for one or more academic programs.

Unique to DARS, is the ability to produce an audit report which includes references to courses, offered at a transfer institution, that have equivalencies to courses that will apply toward the receiving institution’s requirements in a degree program.  This is called a Reference Articulation audit.  Reference Articulation audits provide valuable planning information for your students who need to pick-up courses elsewhere but intend to return to finish their degrees.  This feature also permits an institution to run an audit to use as a "transfer guide" for another college.

In addition to producing Reference Articulation audits, DARS provides transfer articulation features that facilitate interpretation of CLEP/Advanced Placement credits, distribution of awarded credit, and so much more.

Additional information regarding DARS Transfer Articulation and Degree Audit may be obtained from Jason Elwood, Director, DARS Project, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056, (513) 529-5321, FAX: (513) 529-1934, or E-Mail: elwoodj@muohio.edu.

System Design Overview

DARS is designed to support the articulation of student's course work from any combination of institutions and with any course and grade characteristics. So as to support courses originating from several transfer institutions, tables in DARS include institutional identification and the various course identifiers which permit identification of course work beyond the "standard" often used by institutions of higher education.

Once incoming course work has been processed through the DARS institutional profile table, it will be evaluated through a flexible institution-to-institution articulation table. The articulation table provides control options permitting the following:

• Course articulation rules may be date ranged according to when the originating institution’s courses were taken. This capability can be applied to an entire set of articulation rules as might be needed when a sending school changes calendars from quarters to semesters; additionally it can be applied to individual courses within an articulation set.

• Course articulations can be specified in very simple formats.  Additionally, articulations can, optionally, include up to three alternate course (or element) designations for each evaluation, in order to provide an alternative means for meeting degree requirements.  For example, the transfer course,  ENG 100, may articulate to the receiving institution’s  ENGL1001 course, and include an additional identification permitting the course to apply within an audit toward a requirement in Journalism.  While normally ENGL 1001 may not be automatically applied toward the Journalism requirement, there may be a component of the transfer course that makes this alternative application appropriate.

• Many-to-many course articulations which can involve as many, or as few transfer courses and evaluated courses as needed. These many-to-many relationships may be "unbalanced" such as 2 to 3 or 4 to 1, etc.

• Transfer course specification may include leading, trailing, and embedded "wild cards" for more general course articulation specification.

• Course titles or components of course titles may be used for matching transfer courses when the course number itself does not provide the needed differentiation.

• Transfer course matching may be conditioned by "required" grade, minimum credit earned, or any other conditions such as work taken at a four year institution, only for "regular" credit, and the alike - including the presence of some other course(s) in the student's record.

• Transfer courses in many-to-many articulations may require that a minimum total credit be earned and/or that only some minimum number of transfer courses from the list be completed.

• Any evaluated course may optionally have up to five "flag" fields can be assigned and, subsequently, tested in the audit.  These flag fields prove useful, for instance, in the identification of state mandated transfer areas associated with transfer courses.  For example, a science transfer course meets the state identified science area at the transfer institution, and therefore, is under mandate to be applied in the receiving institution’s science requirement.

• Evaluated courses may have a maximum amount of credit assigned to the set. Excess credit from any such limited articulation may be assigned to a specific course outside of the “set”, or accumulated to the end of the transfer course evaluation and assigned to a specified default course, or eliminated.  For example, a combination lecture and lab science course is received from the transfer institution with 5 credits of equal weight to the receiving institutions credits.  However, the receiving institution offers lecture and lab as separate courses – lecture 3 credits, and lab 1 credit.  This distribution of evaluated credit and the determination for the handling of the remaining credit is easily accommodated by DARS in accordance with the institution’s policy.

• Conversions of course credit from quarter to semester or semester to quarter is handled automatically.  Additionally, units and unit scaling is available to convert course credit inherent in a non-typical credit system.   DARS provides several ways to accommodate fractional credit resulting from credit conversions or from reductions in credit precision from transfer to receiving schools. DARS provides output precision from 0 to 5 decimal digits.

• "Unalike" grades on transfer courses that combine in multiple course articulations are supported with grade point average precision on evaluated courses. DARS supports and will generate representative "grade" types that carry over GPA accuracy from these and other course articulations.

• Articulations may have credit forced as would likely be needed when evaluating Advanced Placement test scores in different combinations of courses with credit.

Course articulation will be complete when all the courses from all transfer institutions have been evaluated. Although courses from two or more transfer institutions will not be evaluated in combination during one run; their evaluated courses (or course components) can be combined (even with home courses) during an additional run.

An internal DARS working storage table will be built with all "original" and newly evaluated courses. Institutions wishing to "save" the results of the transfer course articulation process for subsequent use will be able to process this internal table after DARS returns "control" to the institution's "driver" program and manipulate evaluated courses in any way appropriate.

The DARwin client

Miami University has developed a windows application (using PowerBuilder) which maintains the DARS and student support data directly on relational database tables. This application, called DARwin, introduces a level of data maintenance capability that has come to be expected in the window’s PC environment. The DARS data structures have been designed to fit the SQL relational database model. The relational databases directly supported by Miami are Oracle, Sybase, Informix and Microsoft’s SQL Server; however, any ODBC compliant database should be usable. The client/server version of DARS is designed to operate on the popular UNIX platforms (RS 6000, HP 9000, Sun Solaris) as well as on Microsoft’s NT server platform.