On Campus Podcast – Evaluating and Awarding Credits for Prior Learning

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1. Dr. Cunningham’s Career Path (00:01:18) Dr. Cunningham discusses her career path, transitioning from wildlife biology to student affairs administration, and her current role at the American Council on Education (ACE).
2. Overview of Prior Learning Credits (00:02:19) Dr. Cunningham provides an overview of the various formats and history of prior learning credits.
3. History of ACE’s Work (00:04:59) Dr. Cunningham explains ACE’s 70-year history of evaluating military and workplace learning.
4. Benefits of Awarding Credits (00:06:48) Discusses benefits such as increased graduation rates and cost savings for learners.
5. Challenges for Universities and Students (00:09:21) Addresses the challenges students face in identifying and obtaining prior learning credits.
6. Assessment of Prior Learning (00:12:05) Dr. Cunningham discusses how universities evaluate and assess prior learning for credit.
7. Best Practices for Administrators (00:15:06) Recommendations for administrators considering implementing credit for prior learning programs.
8. Faculty and Administrator Opinions (00:16:57) Discusses differing opinions among faculty and administrators regarding prior learning credits, emphasizing the need for better support for traditionally underserved learners.
9. Ensuring Academic Integrity (00:18:17) Dr. Cunningham explains how ACE ensures academic integrity through their evaluation process.
10. Advocacy and Recognition (00:20:15) Mentions various organizations advocating for the recognition of prior learning credits, including the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers and the Council on Adult and Experiential Learning.
11. Resources for Credit for Prior Learning Programs (00:21:34) Dr. Cunningham recommends resources for administrators and faculty looking to start or expand credit for prior learning programs.
12. Future Trends (00:23:17) Discusses future trends in the recognition and application of prior learning credits, focusing on data, technology, and tools to enhance transparency and accessibility of credential information.
13. Using Data for Better Learner Tools (00:23:53) Discusses leveraging data to create richer learner tools and move away from inequitable proxies used by employers.
14. Proactive Evaluation with Technology (00:25:19) Explores using technology to proactively identify learning matches, evaluate them, and attract new learners to institutions.

Ed Butch: Welcome to On Campus with CITI Program, the podcast where we explore the complexities of the campus experience with higher education experts and researchers. I’m your host, Ed Butch. I’m thrilled to have you with us today.

Before we get started, I want to quickly note that this podcast is for educational purposes only, and is not designed to provide legal advice or guidance. In addition, the views expressed in this podcast are solely those of our guests.

Today’s guest is Dr. Sarah Cunningham. Dr. Cunningham is the executive director of One DuPont Ventures at the American Council on Education, known to many in higher education as ACE.

Welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Sarah Cunningham: Thank you. Happy to be here.

Ed Butch: Wonderful. So happy to have you. Today’s discussion centers around credit for prior learning. This is an ever-advancing topic in higher education, and was recently voted as one of our top topics of interest for this podcast by our LinkedIn followers. I’m very excited for the discussion today.

But before we jump in, would you tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself and your career path?

Dr. Sarah Cunningham: Yeah, sure. I have had a little bit of an odd path, with a couple of careers. I started as a wildlife biologist, who realized that I really enjoyed teaching. I found research a little lonely. I taught at an environmental college. And over time, I moved into student affairs administration, looking for ways to help learners solve problems I couldn’t from the classroom. In 2018, I came to the American Council on Education to work on digital credentials for credit for prior learning.

I’ve been lucky enough, at ACE, to work on a variety of projects, which keeps things fun. All focused on strengthening pathways between work and learning to try and improve economic mobility for underserved learners.

Ed Butch: Awesome. Very cool. From environmental biologist to curriculum expert. I love it.

Before we really dive into the topic extensively, can you just give us a brief overview and a general history of the types of prior learning credits for listeners that maybe aren’t familiar?

Dr. Sarah Cunningham: Yeah, sure. There are several different formats that we use today to grant credit for prior learning. The concept definitely isn’t new. The idea of not making someone sit through instruction for skills or content that they already know is commonsense. You can base credit for prior learning on assessment. Prove that you don’t need this course or experience, and you can skip it. ACE actually created one of the earliest vehicles for credit for prior learning in this country in the GED in order to ensure that soldiers who had enlisted prior to completing high school could use their education benefits if they were academically ready for college.

Ed Butch: Wow.

Dr. Sarah Cunningham: Many institutions of higher education have challenge exams. These are an option for a student to test out of the degree requirement. AP exams serve a similar function as well. Colleges use ACE’s credit recommendations to allow incoming students to skip courses that they’ve proven they don’t need through their performance on an exam.

Another format is portfolio assessment. A learner might compile a set of evidence of their learning, and submit that to faculty or other experts to see if that justifies waiving a degree requirement.

Then there’s program evaluation, like ACE provides. Instead of making each learner go through the effort of compiling that portfolio, or taking and often paying for an extra test, we evaluate the actual programs, the courses, the certifications, the apprenticeships that they go through. And then, create a recommendation that’s intended to help colleges know what kind of credit to offer anyone whose completed that experience at an appropriate level of achievement. This has the potential to scale more than other forms. We could evaluate, say a very popular IT certification, and then millions of people could take that certification, and immediately be eligible for credit without having to do anything extra.

I wish that was as smoothly as it works in real life. It doesn’t quite go that smoothly. But that’s why we want to get the word out about credit for prior learning as much as we can.

Ed Butch: Definitely. That’s fascinating. I had no idea about the history with the GED, and everything, and ACE. That’s fantastic and really great to know.

Obviously, that leads me well into my next question, in terms of ACE having such a history with working with universities on prior learning implementation. Can you expand a little bit more on that, and the history that ACE has?

Dr. Sarah Cunningham: Yeah. We’ve been doing this for 70 years now, starting with evaluations for the military. Service members and veterans have access to a joint services transcript that lists their learning and employment record in the military, alongside those recommendations that we make for credit. Then in the ’70s, we expanded that work to include workplace learning as well. In recent years, we’ve added apprenticeships and competency validation, as the world of learning has evolved over time. We’ve become more focused on skills, so has our process.

What we do is we bring in groups of subject matter expert faculty who are teaching at accredited colleges and universities in the disciplines that are in the review. Those teams examine everything about the experience. They look at syllabi. They look at assessments and question banks, rubrics, examples of student work. If there’s on-the-job training involved, they might interview those learners. Then that team has to come to consensus on the number of credits that they think the learning encompasses, the educational level that that learning takes place at, and the subject area. Then that’s what we publish for institutions to rely on so they don’t have to repeat all of that work themselves.

Those programs go through re-review every three to five years. We’re making sure that, as standards in higher education are changing, our credit recommendations get updated to match that.

Ed Butch: Fantastic. I think our listeners probably have some ideas in their head, in terms of some of the benefits of this. What do you really see as some of those benefits of awarding credits through prior learning?

Dr. Sarah Cunningham: I can tell you what I really see, but I’ll also tell you what the research tells us about the benefits. There was a great study published in 2020 by the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education and CAEL that showed that credit for prior learning significantly increases the likelihood of graduation for adult learners. It increases it by 17%.

Ed Butch: Wow.

Dr. Sarah Cunningham: Which is a big affect, and a metric that is affected by so many different variables. Learners who receive at least 12 credits of credit for prior learning can save up to $10,000 and nine to 14 months on their degree.

But here is the key, and the part that I want institutions to hear loud and clear. The learners are saving time and money, but the institutions that granted the credit aren’t losing money by doing so. Because they persist, and graduate at higher rates. So that same study also found that they take more credits at the school that granted them that credit for prior learning than they would have if they didn’t get it, and were more likely to drop out. It is literally a win-win. It’s good for everybody.

But you asked what I see as the benefits of credit for prior learning. I think there is a really important component of this. I don’t have any way to prove this, but I think part of the reason that it’s helpful and successful is because it’s a clear signal to the learner, particularly to an adult learner, that the institution sees them as an individual, and honors the experience and the skills that they bring with them to their educational journey. It’s a really important signal to them that they’re going to be supported. It’s not the only thing that an institution has to do so successfully support adult learners, but it is a really important first start.

Ed Butch: Sense of belonging has been such an aspect that we’re seeing with colleges and universities, and that sense for students. I think that’s a fantastic way of showing, and giving students a sense of belonging, that they are truly honoring that experience that they’ve had.

Dr. Sarah Cunningham: Yeah. You see them as individuals. No one comes to a college or university as a blank slate. That’s an important part of building an educational program that helps set people up for success.

Ed Butch: Wonderful. Well, we know that there’s always maybe some other side of the coin to this as well. What do you see, or what does the research say, are some of the challenges that both universities and students face with prior learning?

Dr. Sarah Cunningham: These are focused on the challenges that students face. But in order to solve those, we also have to ease some of the pain points for the colleges and universities, because that’s where some of those challenges come from.

Students have a really tough time figuring out where they can credit for prior learning, which makes it harder for them to make wise choices about where they invest their effort in their education. Schools don’t always publish their credit for prior learning policies clearly, and students don’t necessarily know to ask about it. They might not know that they’re eligible for this.

For an adult learner who is juggling a full-time job, and maybe family responsibilities, the amount of legwork that we ask them to do right now, it’s unfair and it’s unreasonable. We need to fix it. Right now, ACE, we’re actually working on compiling a centralized database of information about which institutions grant which credit for prior learning. So that hopefully, we can then provide that data to learner tools advocacy groups. But part of the reason that challenge exists is because this also can be a tough process for the institutions.

Figuring out how to intake an external learning experience that is not under your control, and appropriately match it up with the requirements in your own catalog is not an easy job. You don’t want to set a student up for failure by giving them the wrong credit, because then they’re not set up to be successful in their later classes. But it takes a fair amount of work to figure out the right match. And institutions might be working with an old SIS system, might not have a place to record these. Sometimes this is happening in spreadsheets. You’ve got a couple of people in an officer somewhere doing their best. If the process isn’t standardized, then that makes it harder for the institution to be comfortable publishing that information. Because once you put it out there, it’s a promise to students about what will happen.

I think I’ll just say if you are at an institution, any of your listeners that are working to launch or expand a credit for prior learning program, come talk to us at ACE. We have resources to help. We can do some consulting and capacity building. We’re going to be rolling out some new self-service tools later in the year, because there is a lot of interest in this right now. We need to increase our capacity to help institutions and provide some guidance.

Ed Butch: Great. Thank you for that. I think that’s a great lead in, and hoping maybe you can expand a little bit more. In terms of, because of that standardization issue, how do universities really evaluate and assess prior learning for credit? What are some other things that they could be doing?

Dr. Sarah Cunningham: Yeah. Some institutions do this for themselves. They do the full process. It almost always involves the faculty and academic administration to help determine whether something is equivalent to their catalog. The key is usually in comparing learning outcomes. How well they match between the course and the other requirement. The same subject area of content can be offered at different levels of sophistication, so you’re looking at those verbs. Are the students identifying and describing things, or are they analyzing and synthesizing things? If they are doing everything themselves instead of relying on something like ACE’s recommendations, then they also potentially have to obtain additional materials from the provider so they can examine those assessments. That’s the other key component. It’s great to have learning outcomes, but that learning has to be assessed at the appropriate level. You can’t test someone’s ability to create knowledge through a multiple choice exam, for example.

It’s a pretty in-depth process. Faculty are very busy folks. Everyone at a college and university is very busy. Unfortunately, what happens sometimes is that an institution has to default to just granting elective credit, rather than matching it to a degree requirement. We really try to encourage institutions to do that extra step as much as possible, because that often doesn’t help the student. And in some cases, can actually harm them. It’s not great to start a program with lots of credits that aren’t actually applying towards your degree.

Like I said, we’re always trying to work on tools to try and help make this process easier for institutions. We’re standardizing some of the data in our credit recommendations that’s historically been unstructured, so that we can maybe start asking machines to help us align those learning outcomes, and help focus the institution’s work on the most likely matches so that they’re not having to deal with every experience that’s ever been put out there.

Ed Butch: Yeah. As some people worry about AI, maybe this is a place that actually it could help in terms of some of that standardization.

Dr. Sarah Cunningham: Yeah, we think it might. Academic language is difficult and tricky. A lot of the problems we have with mobility of learning, translating learning across different contexts, is not that the learning is different but the language used to describe it is different. That is exactly the kind of task that these large language models are supposed to be good at. We are hoping that that’s going to really help. Again, not take the human out of the loop. There always needs to be the people who know the curriculum best who make the final decision about how it matches up. But maybe, we can help narrow that focus in on what they should be looking at.

Ed Butch: Definitely. All right. What are some recommended best practices for administrators that maybe are thinking about implementing credit for prior learning programs at their institution?

Dr. Sarah Cunningham: There are a lot of them. Again, if you’re looking for advice, come say hi at ACE.

I’ll take a couple. I would strongly encourage institutions to try to rely on methods that do not ask for extra work or cost from the learner. It is already hard enough. They have already put in the investment in learning the thing they learned. Try to avoid extra hoops that they have to jump through. Any time you make something difficult, it means that only people with the resources and bandwidth to get up that hill are going to make it over. It becomes exclusionary.

Be transparent wherever you can. If you’re able to publish the fact that you accept credit for prior learning, then that will help ensure that more learners that are actually eligible for it get to take advantage of it.

Then I think, also bringing the academic colleagues into the process early and helping them understand the benefits. And reassurance that it’s not a threat to their own expertise and teaching. The key is that, without this credit for prior learning, there are some students that will never get to experience the capstone experiences in a degree program. Those most exciting teaching moments where a learner is really taking ownership of their learning, and becoming more of a partner. The stuff that I think most faculty enjoy the most. You’re trading intro seats for graduation caps, ideally.

Ed Butch: Yeah.

Dr. Sarah Cunningham: Then ask for help, I think, would be the last thing to say.

Ed Butch: Definitely, definitely. Which a lot of us are not always good at.

You even said it earlier. It seems like a simple win-win. Simple as in it’s a win-win, but not simple in process. But do you really find that faculty and administrators have differing opinions on prior learning credits?

Dr. Sarah Cunningham: Yes. But I think that’s largely about misunderstandings. Again, that you’re giving something away when you grant credit for prior learning, which is not the case at all.

I think also, in the last few years, we’ve definitely seen a growing momentum around the need to better support traditionally underserved learners.

Ed Butch: Yeah.

Dr. Sarah Cunningham: Adult and working learners, parent learners, military learners. Those non-traditional groups are the only growing demographic of college goers for the foreseeable future, so institutions are looking for ways to support them. Credit for prior learning is an important tool. It gives them a boost right from the get-go. And as we were talking about before, it also demonstrates that the institution is committed to helping them.

I think again, once you’re able to explain the benefits, reassure folks, then a lot of those differences in opinion come a little closer together.

Ed Butch: When I was working in academic affairs, and would have conversations with faculty around some of these areas, one of the things that I often heard was about the academic integrity. How can universities, or even how does ACE ensure the academic integrity of the credits earned through prior learning?

Dr. Sarah Cunningham: Our process is designed to ensure that integrity. That we’re bringing in independent experts, and asking them to gauge the learning and experience against their understanding as experts of expectations in post-secondary education. So that as those expectations change, our recommendations can change with them.

But there is a really important part of the puzzle that historically has been really hard for ACE to get, and that institutions can help us out with by doing that academic integrity check on their own side. And that’s tracking the outcomes of learners who have received credit for prior learning at your institution. Because that is a way to identify if there is a problem. No human process is perfect. If there is a mismatch somewhere, so either in a credit recommendation that ACE has generated or the way in which an institution thinks they can bring it into the catalog and what it counts as, we should be, able to see that disconnect if students aren’t succeeding in the rest of their program. We’re always hungry for that data back from institutions.

But in order to get it, you have to be tracking those learners and be able to identify that population. It takes some sophistication there. Again, sometimes those SIS systems are not set up to help you do that. We would really encourage institutions to track those outcomes, and not to be shy about letting us know if they see a problem with something. That can trigger a reconsideration of an equivalency that’s been built.

Ed Butch: Right. Thank you. You mentioned advocacy earlier. ACE obviously is one of those organizations that is advocating for this. But do you see other advocacy groups or organizations that are really working to expand the recognition of these credits?

Dr. Sarah Cunningham: Yeah. It’s a hot topic right now. I think most of the organizations that we work with are interested in this. Folks are working on this on a number of fronts. Policy, practice. Tools and technology is a really big front right now. ACE convened the National Transfer Taskforce a few years ago, to make recommendations to the sector that included credit for prior learning support. The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, who most of us know as AACRAO, has some great initiatives right now focused on the technology for representing credit for prior learning.

While that credit for prior learning is important, I mentioned earlier, it’s only one component of effectively supporting adult learners. The Council on Adult and Experiential Learning, CAEL, has best practices for institutions that include that credit for prior learning, but then extend to how the learner is supported during their enrollment. What are the other things that you need to do in order to help non-traditional students be successful? That’s where I’d point folks.

Ed Butch: Wonderful. I’m sure many of these organizations have this. But what are some resources that you would recommend for administrators, and faculty, and our listeners that are looking to start or even expand some of their credit for prior learning programs?

Dr. Sarah Cunningham: Yeah. I’d recommend that you come on over to ACE’s website, or those other organizations also have great resources.

We have some publications that are specifically around letting institutions do a bit of a self-assessment. Where are you on this journey? Are you at the very beginning of this process? Are you a little bit more advanced? We’ll be rolling out some new self-service resources for institutions over the rest of this year. Again, as I said, we’re getting more interest than we have bandwidth to help out with at the moment, so we’re looking to expand resources that institutions can check out on their own. Talking about how you set up a policy, how do you start grating credit for prior learning, how do you ensure that consistency and integrity. A little bit about how you actually do the process of matching up those experiences between your catalog and something from outside the institution. Then we also have communities of practice that we can help introduce institutions to.

Yeah, that would be my recommendation. Start reading stuff, there’s good stuff out there. Then let us know when you need help and what you need. We’re also taking those requests to help guide what we produce in the future. If everyone is looking for particular help on policy, that’s great for us to know so that we can get more material out there for them.

Ed Butch: Right. You just said a keyword there, that I always like to end episodes on, and that’s future.

Dr. Sarah Cunningham: Yeah.

Ed Butch: Looking at the future, what trends do you see in the recognition and application of prior learning credits?

Dr. Sarah Cunningham: I think there’s really exciting stuff on the horizon. A lot of it is around data, and technology, and tools that we are able to create now.

We work pretty closely with the Credential Engine, which is an organization that has created a language to describe the data around credentials called credential transparency description language. That allows information that has historically been hidden away in PDFs, LinkedIn, obscure parts of a college website, to potentially be machine-readable. That then lets us use that data to create better learner tools. There’s a lot of interest right now in learning and employment records, or LERs. These are rich digital records of a person’s work and education that could use that structured data to create a fuller picture of someone’s capabilities.

All of this getting more granular with our understanding, representation, and documentation of a person’s learning. The hope is that better tools like these let us move away from proxies that employers have had to rely on in the past that perpetuate inequity. Like, “Did you go to a fancy school? Or do you even have a college degree?” If we can do a better job of helping people document and represent their skills, then it opens up new opportunities for people who have been locked out of those old pathways to a sustainable, healthy career.

And I think there’s a potential, like we were talking about before, with the help of AI, that we could switch the model to be less reactive and more proactive. For a lot of institutions, particularly if they don’t have a lot of bandwidth in the offices that are responsible for credit for prior learning … I have yet to meet an over-resourced registrar’s office. There’s a lot riding on that team’s shoulders. They’re doing a lot. They are often only looking at the learning experiences that come to them from a student. It’s reactive, rather than proactive. If we can use technology to help institutions identify matches that are out there, proactively evaluate them, make a decision about whether or not they can award credit, and then put that out to learners and advertise that to them. Then we think this has the potential to be a real enrollment driver for institutions that are committed to supporting these learners.

We think, again, it’s that win-win. If you put that information out there for learners, it makes it easier for them to find the right match. That will bring new learners to college or university, who wouldn’t have found them otherwise. That’s what we’re really excited to get to.

Ed Butch: Great. Thank you. Some great information there. I appreciate it, and that concludes our conversation for today. Once again, I’d like to thank Dr. Cunningham for sharing your experience with us.

Dr. Sarah Cunningham: Thank you very much for giving me a chance to. I could talk about this all day, so appreciate it.

Ed Butch: I invite all of our listeners to visit citiprogram.org to learn more about our courses and webinars on research, ethics, compliance, and higher education. I look forward to bringing you more expert guests to discuss what’s happen On Campus.