Exploring What’s Possible for Reverse Transfer: A Discovery Journey with Transfer Explorer

Transfer Explorer has kicked off an exciting research and discovery project to explore the opportunities involving reverse transfer.

What is reverse transfer?

Reverse transfer is the process that allows students who transfer from a two-year institution to a four-year institution to potentially combine credits earned at both schools to receive an associate degree after they have transferred.

For students, earning an associate degree can be meaningful. It can represent an important academic milestone, provide a credential they can use to gain employment while continuing to work toward a bachelor’s degree, and potentially waive general education requirements.

But reverse transfer is deceptively complex.

For students, the struggle is that most don’t know what reverse transfer is or that it even exists as an option. If they do know about it, they have questions about their eligibility and how their credits count.

For colleges and universities, reverse transfer touches on policies, data, communications, and cross-institutional coordination across institutions, as well as equipping staff with the information they need to effectively advise students about this option.

For our team, these challenges create an opportunity to focus on one critical question:

How might Transfer Explorer help in making reverse transfer more visible, understandable, and actionable for students and the people that support them?

At ITHAKA and on the Transfer Explorer team we believe in a transfer experience where all credits should count. By partnering with institutions and combining better data with thoughtful automation and transparency, Transfer Explorer aims to make it easier for earned credits to be recognized and applied, therefore helping students get the full value of the education they’ve already completed.

Before determining ways in which Transfer Explorer can be explicit about its role in assisting reverse transfer, we need to understand the experience surrounding the process.

Listening to students and institution staff.

To see reverse transfer from multiple perspectives, over the past several weeks, the Transfer Explorer team, led by Nechelle Calhoun and Chris Buonocore, has been conducting discovery interviews with students and staff members. These conversations are helping our understanding of the current workflows of staff members, how they are starting to use the Transfer Explorer tool to answer questions about equivalencies for reverse transfer, and how the entire process is grasped by students.

Trying to understand the experience rather than simply collecting feature requests, we are asking questions like:

• How do students first hear about reverse transfer?
• What do they think it means?
• What makes them interested or hesitant to participate?
• What information do the staff need to do their jobs?
• Where and how do handoffs work between the institutions?
• What parts of the process are difficult to manage?
• How has Transfer Explorer helped in the process?
• What would make the experience meaningfully better?

From discovery to design jam.

User experience research is only the beginning.

Now that we have had the opportunity to listen and synthesize what we have learned, we will bring our work into a three-day design jam with participating institutions and their students.

The design jam will give us the opportunity to move from understanding to experimentation.

A design jam is a focused, collaborative workshop where participants come together to rapidly explore ideas, make concepts tangible, and learn through experimentation. Rather than trying to identify the perfect solution upfront, we’ll work together to generate possibilities, prototype ideas, and get feedback quickly.

We will take the opportunity areas that emerged from discovery findings and explore potential solutions through collaborative design activities, ideation, prototyping, and feedback.

The goal of the three days isn’t to walk away with a finished product.

We want to leave with:

• A shared understanding of the biggest reverse transfer opportunities
• New ideas grounded in student and staff needs
• Concepts that we can test
• A clearer sense of what ideas are worth pursuing
• New questions that can guide the next phase of discovery and design
• Another blog post!

We want to hear from you!

As we are actively working on this project, we’re intentionally opening the door to perspectives beyond those participating directly in the research.

If you have worked in reverse transfer, supported students in the process, used or are interested in using Transfer Explorer, or simply want to share your thoughts on how the reverse transfer experience can be better, we’d love to hear from you!

Your perspective could help shape the questions we ask, the opportunities we explore, and ultimately the solutions we design.

Have thoughts, experiences, examples, or questions about reverse transfer or Transfer Explorer? Reach out to the team at TransferExplorer@ithaka.org!