Ellucian Launches eTranscripts for Clearinghouse Clients

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 03/03/14

Institutional users of Ellucian's Banner, Colleague, and PowerCampus will shortly have a free update in their student management and enterprise resource planning applications to authenticate, produce, and transfer student transcripts. Ellucian is working with the National Student Clearinghouse to create Ellucian eTranscripts, an interface that automates many of the tasks related to the processing of transcripts. The interface uses the PESC XML Transcript standards to simplify its integration with institutional applications.

According to research done by the Clearinghouse's Research Center, fulfilling requests manually takes institutions an average of four days. eTranscripts will finish comparable processing in "minutes. Nine out of 10 transcripts will be processed without any manual intervention. The "Transfer and Mobility" report has found that the volume of transcript requests is rising as college students transfer or change schools more readily; a third do so at least once over the course of five years.

Administrators at Amarillo College, a Colleague customer that deals with thousands of transcripts every year, said they expect the new solution to speed up a number of processes. "The processes for student authentication and identification, transcript order submission and transcript PDF generation and customization are all automated, providing immediate and secure electronic transcript delivery," said CIO Lee Colaw. "Students can submit a transcript request outside of normal office hours and receive an official transcript PDF within 20 to 30 minutes. This is a great service for them when they are applying for jobs, scholarships, or admission to a university."

eTranscripts will be made available at no cost to Ellucian support customers that choose to activate the API and that also participate in Transcript Ordering, which is free to institutions.

"Integrating our administrative systems with other solutions and services to improve efficiency on campus is a core goal of Ellucian's extensible ecosystem," said Mark Jones, the company's chief product officer. "eTranscripts is a simple, no-cost solution that eases the workload on staff and lets the institution serve its students better."

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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