Action Research Plan

Plan	Responses
Your context	I work at a large university that serves about 50,000 students, offering bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs through on-campus, hybrid, and fully online formats. While the university is a leader in research, its sports programs, particularly football, basketball, and hockey, significantly impact campus life.  In my role, I support the advising community and am part of a team of 15 educational developers and instructional designers serving all educators across campus. The undergraduate advising community includes over 200 academic advisors, which support students in undergraduate majors and minors, transition and first-year student programs, and exploratory advising.
Your plan	A significant challenge for students and academic advisors is the current transfer credit evaluation process. The evaluation procedures vary widely between departments, which creates confusion about where syllabi should be submitted and how quickly they will be processed.  Implementing a standardized tracking system with a clear timeline for transfer credit review would address this issue. The system would provide both advisors and students with real-time updates on the status of their transfer credit requests, improving transparency and processing.
Stakeholders	Registrar Office representative - this person has a position of power and manages transfer credit processing. Department faculty that evaluate transfer credit   Academic advisors (undergraduate) Students Instructional designers from Center for Teaching and Learning Innovation - this group has the least influence and are more of support.
Participation	Students - This group is directly impacted, as their academic progress and course scheduling often rely on the evaluation of transfer credits. Delays in processing transfer credits can result in students enrolling in unnecessary courses, which causes financial stress and potentially extended time to completing their degree. Conducting focus groups with transfer students can provide insight into their experience with the transfer credit process, identify what tracking mechanisms would be helpful, and determine an ideal timeline for completing their transfer credit evaluation.  Academic Advisors - Advisors assist students in creating their schedules each semester and track progress towards degree completion. If there are unknown transfer credits not yet processed or posted to a student’s record, advisors may create incorrect academic plans and be accused of incorrect advising. Academic advisors will often check with departments and the Registrar on behalf of students, and know policies and guidelines around transfer credits. Advisor voices are essential to this process, and asking advisors across units their thoughts about the current process and what would be helpful in their work with students is important. In creating a new process for tracking transfer credit evaluation, advisors should be included and asked for feedback at each milestone of development and implementation. Registrar Staff - The Registrar is frequently contacted about transfer credit processing and manages the transfer credit equivalency process in partnership with campus departments. Including the Registrar to share their process for receiving and forwarding syllabi on to departments, as well as their process for posting approved credits or notifying students that credits were not approved is important information and needed feedback for this new process.  Department Evaluation Leads - This group receives syllabi from the Registrar and will determine if the course is equivalent to a class offered within their department. This information is then sent back to the Registrar for posting. Departments have quite a lot of variability in how they process these requests and the length of time it takes. Departments are essential in this process and will provide important insight into how they may differ and overlap with other departments.
Act and Observe	Replace the italicized text in this column with your responses.
Implementation	Design - In the initial stage of creating the new transfer credit tracking system and timeline, the Registrar, Academic Advisors, department leads, and students will be recruited to obtain feedback on pain points of the current process and to learn what features and functionality are needed for the new process from each group.  Questions - What would be the cost of a new tracking system? Could the current systems could be enhanced instead (Registrar)? This may cause limitations on what we create.  Development - Instructional designers will lead in creating a prototype for the Registrar, students, department leads, and academic advisors to review and share additional feedback.  Question - since the process varies slightly between departments, can the timeline or tool be customized to departments or will it need to be standard across all units?  Implementation/Launch - After receiving approval to launch from the Registrar, instructional designers will finalize edits and launch the tracking system. Training will be conducted with registrar staff, academic advisors, and department leads to understand the new tracking process and timeline to ensure consistency.  Question - will all users, including students, have the ability to track their transfer credit status in real-time? Post-Launch Feedback - Feedback surveys will be available so that all stakeholders, including students, can share their experience with the new system and if additional improvements are needed.  Question - What happens if a department is delaying credit evaluation past the deadline (2 weeks)? How will this be flagged?
Data collection	Focus groups for initial feedback - Help to gather user experience of the current process from advisors, students, and department evaluation leads, and gain insight into areas of improvement from each group. Focus groups can help to give a variety of perspectives and opportunities for deeper conversations.  Survey responses from stakeholders - Collects both qualitative and quantitative information. Can gain feedback on the user experience with the new process, both during prototype phase and after launch, while also identifying average processing time, how frequently and accurately the status of transfer credit is updated, and any courses that are taking longer than others.
Reflect	Replace the italicized text in this column with your responses.
Data analysis	The focus group could serve as a pre-implementation metric, learning what the average processing time is for evaluating transfer credit before the new tracking system is launched, as well as how each group currently feels about the current process by using a satisfaction rating scale.  After launching the new tracking system and timeline, similar questions regarding processing time and user satisfaction will be asked from each group to identify if there are improvements.  Results of the pre- and post-implementation feedback would be shared with all groups involved, providing stakeholders with opportunities to provide recommendations during each stage of the process.
Report	All key findings, from the initial focus group to idea collection and course development, launch, and post-implementation feedback, will all be organized into a single report to be shared with stakeholders. The report will summarize key takeaways from the focus group, what solutions were generated from those discussions and development phase, and user satisfactory scale comparisons using graphs. Included will be a link to a feedback survey to collect ongoing insights from campus partners and recorded training for how to use the new tracking tool.
Reflect, revise, and next steps	The first step is formulating a focus group of students, Registrar staff, advisors, and department evaluation leads. After identifying key participants, an agenda and list of questions will need to be put together in preparation for the focus group(s).