Transfer Articulation Encoding

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Encoding (also known as "Transfer Articulation," or just "TA") is the process by which courses from other institutions are evaluated for credit at your institution. The encoding process involve translating your institution's transfer evaluation rules and policies, entering information about your transfer institutions, and then determining how their courses match (articulate to) those at your institution. After TA tables are set up, they also need to be maintained. Fortunately, the entire tedious process is automated by the uAchieve application.

Encoding is accessible via the Self-Service menu bar/Home page since the 4.3 release:

NOTE ABOUT SPECIAL CHARACTERS: We recommend against the user of special characters (e.g., "&", ";", ":") in your encoding practices. The use of special characters breaks JavaScript, which creates a problem in Self-Service since the TA Encoding area is JavaScript-based. Resultant performance issues may include high memory spikes and server disruption. Look for special characters that were incorporated in course titles, segments, and/or rules.

Historically, encoding was only accomplished in the uAchieve Client via the Transfer button:

The Transfer Articulation page is generated. From here, you may Search available schools (by School Name or Source ID) or Add New School:

TIP:
The total number of schools available for TA is hinted at below the Search text box field.

uAchieve and Encoding

The uAchieve application can:

Identify courses as Home (Target) courses or Transfer (source) courses
Recognize Transfer course naming conventions
Equate Transfer courses with appropriate Home course designations
Translate grades and credit from Transfer-to-Home values
Store course equivalencies per institution
Store program-specific equivalencies per institution
Store statewide transfer rules and agreements
Treat Transfer courses differently than Home courses in an audit report

Schools

Search

Click directly in the Search field to search existing schools by either School Name or School ID.

As the search term is typed, a list of schools that match automatically populate the table under the search field.

TIP:
Enter three spaces with the spacebar key on your keyboard to return an all-inclusive list of available schools.

View

From the TA screen, you can View () a particular school of interest:

Typically, there is only one IREF table per institution–at most two.

When clicking the View button, a combined list of all of the unique schools that the user has TA tables and IREF tables set up for will display:

Rename

Re-name any existing school via the Rename button. Edit the name and click the Change Name button to enact the new name change:

Clone, Edit, Delete

From an existing IREF or TA table, you may also Clone, Edit, or Delete:

The School Name and Source ID are listed in the header above the table, along with the number of IREF tables (top) and Transfer tables (bottom) created for the selected school:

Click the Return to List () button to return to the previous search screen.

Add New School

Click the Add New School button () to add a new institution to the Transfer Articulation list. The Add New School pop-up window prompts the user to key in a school name and unique Source ID:

Click Cancel to remove the cancel the school addition, or Add School to continue.

When you log in to Self-Service Encoding, you must perform a one-time Add New School () for any of your "missing" schools in order to pull the information from the Client into Self-Service.

Our recommended best practice is to create all of your new schools via the Self-Service web app as opposed to in the Client.

Add uAchieve Tables

A blank list of tables appears where you may proceed with the articulation, which involves adding Institutional Reference (IREF) Tables () and/or Transfer Articulation (TA) Tables () for your specific institution:

These green action buttons will walk you through a wizard to assist in setting up a new table.

Wizards

The wizard consists of several fields that help build new IREF and TA tables:

The wizard for TA will contain one additional field: DPMask (optional):

Fields

Description

First Year Term

(required)

Input the First Year Term

(Default: 000000)

Source CD

(optional)

Input the Source CD, if applicable

DPMask

(optional)

Input the DPMask, if applicable

DPMask field is for TA only

Create IREF button () to create a new IREF table
Create TA button () to create a new TA table
Cancel () to discard the new table

IREF Tables

Institutional Reference tables (or IREF tables) outline several items for both your Home institution as well as each Transfer institution from which student may have courses, including the following:

course structure
institutional calendar
recognized grades

See IREF Tables to add new tables and other information.

TA Tables

Transfer Articulation tables (or TA tables) contain the rules for each Transfer institution that specificy what is generated as an equivalency at your Home institution when source courses are evaluated.

See TA Tables to add new tables and other information.

Edit Table

Edit any existing tables (IREF or TA) via the Edit button ().

Save

Click the Save button () to conserve all data and changes made on the table screen to the database.

The Save button appears faded/deactivated () when the Save function is unavailable because no changes have been implemented to be saved.

Once the TA table is created, critical fields that are part of the primary key (i.e., Source ID, Source CD, DPMask, FYT, and LYT) will appear grayed out and cannot be edited (e.g., Source ID: )

Exit Table

Click the Exit Table button () to return to the previous articulation screen in Self-Service, where all IREF and TA tables are displayed.

Table Footer

In the footer of the table, two areas list modification details for the selected IREF or TA table:

Last Modified provides a date/time stamp of the last change to the table
By identifies the user (by username) who performed the last modification to the selected table

This information can prove valuable to encoders tracking changes in transfer articulation within the institution.

Three Characteristics of a Source Course

Information in the uAchieve tables changes incoming transfer courses into something your institution recognizes using the three characterstics of a transfer course: course identity, course credit, and course grade.

Course Identity

A Transfer course can be articulated into an equivalent course. uAchieve can artculate a variety of course sets:

one-to-one
one-to-many
many-to-one

uAchieve can also articulate transfer courses to departmental-level credit.

* Course information is stored in TA tables *

Course Credit

The credit associated with a course from an institution under a calendar system different than yours can be converted or articulated.

Course Grade

uAchieve articulates grades on Transfer courses into to those acceptable by your institution.

* Articulation of credit and grades is handled by IREF tables *

Adding Courses

In the Transfer Articulation area, use the Add or Save buttons to add courses in Self-Service.

NOTE:
The [Enter] button on the keyboard cannot be used for quick entry of courses at this time.

To learn more, consult the functional documentation and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) below:

Documentation	Description
Calendar Conversion Encoding Information	Function document addressing how to encode for calendar conversions, e.g., quarter-semester changes
Transfer Articulation FAQs	Frequently Asked Questions pertaining to the new Transfer Articulation feature in uAchieve Self-Service
Course Condition Codes	Setting course condition codes in the uAchieve client and workarounds