The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education
(WICHE) and ACE have announced a collaboration to help
more students with prior learning attain high-quality postsecondary credentials.
WICHE’s Interstate Passport Network®, with 46 members in 15
states, enables block transfer of students’ completed lower-division general
education credits among participating institutions based on an agreed upon set
of learning outcomes. Basing transfer articulation on the 63 Passport Learning
Outcomes (PLOs), rather than on matching specific courses and credits, can
help reduce credit loss, saving students time and money and increasing their
chances of graduating. The discipline-specific learning outcomes were developed
by multi-state faculty teams convened by WICHE. Now, ACE will also use the PLOs
as a framework in evaluating and recommending
college credit for training, certifications, and exams offered by hundreds
of providers and major employers.
For over 60 years, using an industry standard process, ACE’s
faculty panels have evaluated learning that happens outside of the formal college
setting and issued recommendations for academic credit. Going forward, ACE will
use the PLOs as a framework for evaluating general education, college-level
knowledge and skills embedded in some of these extra-institutional learning
opportunities. The specific PLOs achieved by a learner will appear on a new
digital transcript on Credly’s Acclaim platform, which institutions can use to
translate students’ documented knowledge and skills into courses for general
education credit. The PLOs provide colleges and universities with more depth as
to what ACE transcript holders know and are able to do as they consider credit
recommendations.
“Post-traditional
learners face an uphill battle towards their degree goals when institutions are
unable to recognize their prior learning. The Passport Learning Outcomes are a
great example of a framework that could become the common language for general
education to help a wider array of students get the credit they’ve earned for
what they know, regardless of where they learned it,” said Louis Soares, ACE chief
learning and innovation officer.
Students who receive credit for prior learning graduate at
higher rates, which results in more credits taken from their chosen
institutions. This benefit holds true across racial/ethnic populations. Today
more than ever, all students need flexible pathways to help them restart their
careers, resume interrupted educational journeys, or skill up for new
opportunities.
“Interstate Passport is a game changer on many levels with
the WICHE/ACE collaboration extending its benefits even further than we had
hoped,” said Demaree Michelau, WICHE president. “With the significant economic
downturn and impacts of COVID-19 having disproportionate adverse impacts on underserved
students and students of color, this collaboration has great potential to not
only mitigate some of the negative effects of the pandemic, but we also expect
that it will go further and improve outcomes for vulnerable populations.”
The Passport Learning Outcomes can serve as a common
language describing knowledge and skill attainment that happens in different
contexts, building connections between workforce and academia so that students
can move more easily between them without losing ground on the journey.
The Passport Learning Outcomes and ACE digital transcripts
were developed with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie
Corporation of New York, and the Lumina Foundation. For more information, visit
ACE’s Learning
Evaluation and the WICHE Interstate
Passport program.