Digital, Seamless, Global: Student Records go Digital
I love my doctoral testamur. Three years’ worth of reading, thinking and reimagining captured in an A4 piece of yellow card lacquered with blue print and typewriter craft. Its appearance is so, well, Etsy, that you couldn’t make it up if you tried.
As a consequence, I have always taken the view that its security features must be deeply cunning. Take, for example, the full stop after the issuance date, which probably reflected the unique finger pressure of the university’s chief testamur typist.
Along the same lines, the slightly raised hyphen connotes institutional individuality.
Best of all, though, is the assertion that it ‘appears’ that I satisfied the degree requirements, thus leaving open a lifelong opportunity for affirmation of my achievement, or denial, or even recall. It appeared that I got a doctorate, but that is not the same thing necessarily as saying that I really got a doctorate. Welcome to the world of the testamur as hedge-betting device.
The security features of student attainment records have become far less cunning over the past 22 years. Watermarks, seals, holographic stickers, unique identifier numbers and textured ink are offered in conjunction with either websites or services that someone has the degree that they claim.
But in lots of ways, things remain remarkably unchanged. Graduation, applying for admission to another program, and providing evidence of my achievements to employers still depend very heavily on paper. I get a piece of paper with either a certifier’s or a Justice of the Peace’s stamp on it to gain access to new opportunities. I have to post that paper through snail mail and hope that it all gets through to the right person.
On the other side of that transaction, I am expected to know what the security features are of the piece of paper, or I trust that the JP stamp is a certification of authenticity.
In my first blog for the year I indicated that a push for digital student records is important for employers and educational institutions, but it is most critical for students. They move, and they do not or cannot always take paper with them. Documented identity is the key to migration, to social supports, to educational opportunities. We ought to be drawing upon the rapid advances in smart contracts, crypto-transactions and distributed ledger technologies to make identification and authentication seamless and global in the service of social good.
A first step that I am proud to be a part of is the Digital Student Data project—my eQuals—which now boasts a membership of 45 universities from across Australia and New Zealand. The aim of the project is simple: to provide a secure, digital record of student attainments at any one of those universities. No stamps, no waiting for things to arrive in the post or to send them.
Simple things require a complex sequence of actions in the background to make them work. The My eQuals project, for instance, means connecting the preferred solution—Digitary—up to at least eight student system arrangements: in house or bespoke constructed; Jade; Tribal; a combination of Tribal and Callista; Callista; Ellucian; Student One and PeopleSoft. As those of you who work in IT or student administration know, student systems have big personalities and they don’t always play nicely with other applications, particularly their databases. You also have to manage 45 university legal departments for contracts, and to ask people to take a leap of faith and to upload data in XML—eXtensible Markup Language—format rather than PDF so that you keep yourself open to new initiatives in credit transfer and mobility.
It is complex, but worth it. I know this because the University at which I work has been offering digital transcripts, graduation statements (the Australian Higher Education Graduation Statement, or AHEGS, which is a diploma supplement) and testamurs via Digitary since 2010.
We have saved just under $11,000 per year in paper costs plus the effort of printing, transporting and rolling papers into tubes.
But those figures are small fry compared to the benefit of cutting out ‘middle men’ in document production and presentation, and in providing access to a stable repository where you, another educational institution or an employer can check your records of attainment. Things have evolved to the point where we only hand out physical testamurs at graduation, and offer free access to digital records or print on demand for a small fee.
Students still want to order paper transcripts—a service we have offered at graduation since 2015—as this usage graph attests:
But ecopies now account for 40% of all student-led document requests, and the volume of requests now exceeds 20,000 per year for what is a small university of around 23000 students and 100,000 alumni.
That the number of issuances has declined since 2014 is not a reflection of lessening confidence in our digital provision; it is more a reflection that just over 40% of our students have opted for longer—four to five year—double degree programs since the introduction of the flexi doubles in that year. It also tells us that we have more students enrolled and working part time, but that’s another story.
And we also have good individual stories to tell, with some of the world’s oldest universities telling us that they have been able to turn around the admissions applications of our students faster, and employers such as the UN now accepting that digital records are just as good—if not better—than paper copies.
This is all an intimation of what is to come, if we embrace a digital turn in university document security. In working together across two sectors, I like to think that we are getting ourselves ready to take advantage of emerging initiatives such as Blockcerts, a collaboration between Learning Machine and the MIT Media Lab which offers an open standard for certificates via Blockchain. The technology is great, but the cooperation of such a large proportion of the Australian and New Zealand sectors is nothing short of a miracle.
But I am also wondering whether it might also allow us to deliver a new sense of ancient tradition in graduation ceremonies. If you do not need to hand out paper, what can you hand out? If you could verify who has turned up by means other than a pen and a clipboard, would you do it? And could we foresee a world in which a testamur goes live at the point at which a Chancellor confers, and each student has their record linked to a pronunciation of their name which is their own, rather than an institutional rendering of it? In short, could we combine history with personalisation? That is the kind of extension of engagement that I would love to see, and it doesn’t require you to be cunning.
This blog’s shout-out is to the steering committee of the My eQuals Project, chaired by Peter Marshall, to Mark Erickson, who rolled out Digitary at the University at which I work, and to whoever typed up my testamur.
