What’s the Deal with Comprehensive Learner Records?

Comprehensive Learner Records are billed as a new way for learners to communicate the totality of their educational experience. But, what goes in a CLR? How are students utilizing it? In this episode, we are joined by one of the early adopters of CLRs, Dr. Rodney Parks, Assistant Vice President & University Registrar at Elon University. Dr. Parks will share how they developed their CLR, the impacts of their work, and how he sees the CLR evolving in the future.

Transcript

Matthew Sterenberg (00:00.994)

All right, Dr. Rodney Parks, welcome to the podcast. Rodney, how are you?

 

Rodney Lee Parks (00:06.914)

I’m good. How are you?

 

Matthew Sterenberg (00:08.622)

I’m doing fantastic. So you were just telling me you’ve got, you’re preparing for your trips. I think that’s a good place to start just as like an interesting tidbit about you. you lead student trips to, I mean, how many times have you climbed Kilimanjaro at this point?

 

Rodney Lee Parks (00:26.106)

This will be the sixth time in January that I’ve climbed Kilimanjaro and the 13th time that I’ve done the Inca Trail with students over Thanksgiving. So I’m one of those registrars, you know, a little bit of student affairs, a little bit of teaching, a little bit of registrar work. I try to, you know, have my hands in lot of different pots these days.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (00:46.446)

Well, I think that’s a really good kind of segue into the conversation today because you’re assistant vice president, you’re teaching as well, you’re the registrar. And what you’re doing with these students is obviously kind of not easily reflected in the transcript, right? And so the totality of the student experience is much bigger than the traditional academic transcript and

 

Rodney Lee Parks (01:05.166)

Right.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (01:14.466)

You’ve done some awesome work with the comprehensive learner record and that’s the purpose of today’s conversation. But let’s go back in time a little bit. How did you like, what’s the Genesis story? What’s the why behind the comprehensive learner record at Elon University? Give me the beginning story.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (01:23.011)

Mm

 

Rodney Lee Parks (01:33.43)

Yeah, so I think the beginning of the story would be in the early 2000s, Elon decided to have a comprehensive record that included both the academic and some co -curricular experiences that were part of a graduation requirement. so historically, Student Affairs had always had a co -curricular transcript. And I think all over the country, early on, Student Affairs created this transcript type that would document some of those Student Affairs activities.

But over time, you know, it was part of that transcript, but it wasn’t being used very often. So they would actually have to get the academic transcript from the registrar’s office, and then they would get the student affairs transcript from, you know, the student affairs side. And early on, we noticed that it just wasn’t being requested. Students don’t want to go to multiple places to get a comprehensive look at what their student experience, you know, truly was.

Capturing it on the academic transcript helped. And so early on we had four experiences, study abroad, global education, we had research and we had internship. And then a few years later we added leadership. And so, you know, creating the transcript itself was already in place from a student affairs side and they were pulling various leadership experiences.

from campus labs, they were pulling global education from, you know, a course code that we would put on the course. And so they had a little bit of an experience or transcript. But in 2013, whenever I started here, I started looking at that transcript and we began to wonder, what would happen if we combined the academic and the co -curricular transcript together? Would students order a combination of the two transcripts?

And we did a good job of marketing it. We pulled the academic transcript over and the experiential transcript over and we concatenated those two together. And it gave a better comprehensive look at what those experiences are. So you had the academic transcript in Maroon. The next page would be gold and it would show the experiences. So you might see something like research on the academic transcript, but then on the experiential transcript,

 

Rodney Lee Parks (03:58.222)

It would detail out what that research project truly was. And so that was a great step. And we saw early on that it created hundreds of transcripts that first year. Part of that was the marketing techniques we were using. We were starting to train students in Elon 1010, which is our first year course. We started encouraging seniors to use it and how to use it and upload it on social media.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (04:00.506)

I think it’s time that we all get ready for the next round of the 2019 -2020 World Cup.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (04:27.342)

so that we really bombarded them that first year with a lot of educational opportunities and how to use that academic transcript. In 2015, Acro was giving out grants to create basically extended learner records. And Elon was part of that group of six schools that received part of that grant and working with Acro to create a new type of transcript that converted a lot of that text -based document

 

Matthew Sterenberg (04:50.618)

you

 

Rodney Lee Parks (04:57.336)

to an infographic type of document. so, you know, taking, for example, global education and just saying, you know, that Matthew studied abroad in Peru, you know, or having a course code of study abroad Peru, it actually would mark it on a map. And so you were able to see all the various places that a student studied abroad on a map of the world. And so,

And then when you hovered over it, it would actually say where you studied abroad. So if you were in Santiago for a semester, it would actually indicate that same thing for research. You know, we began to collect more information on research. So it didn’t just say research. It said, let’s say something like qualitative phenomenology in adventure -based learning. And so there was much more detail associated with research doing the same thing. We could embed, you know, presentations.

We could embed, with the PowerPoints that a student used. We could embed the internship and the number of hours that the students used completed for that company. Internship was stored with a company, so we knew the company name. We could put the graphic of the company name. And so all of those things were captured in an infographic way based on the text.

information that we were getting initially from those two data sources. And the two data sources were pulled into, you know, using Parchment, were pulled into the graphics design that Parchment created. And it was really not a lot of work initially on the side of the institution because we were just providing the data in a flat file and then Parchment had created the back end that converted the infographics. And so we shared the responsibility between Parchment and Elon to create this really unique looking transcript that provided more depth to the student experience.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (07:03.086)

Yeah, calling it a transcript is almost, you know, I think a disservice to it because the visual nature of it, a transcript, never looks great. It’s an inside baseball document. It’s courses, credits and grades. And this is to your point, the visual nature of it is so much more impactful. I think about

 

again, the why behind this? Was it because students had a hard time really looking back and describing their experience? it the institution wanted to make sure their students walked away? Like, this is what it meant to be at Elon? Or was it just you identifying like, hey, I think there’s a need here. You know, we’re hearing from employers, like, what’s the mix of because this is a lot of your I think

 

Rodney Lee Parks (07:47.437)

Yeah.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (07:53.272)

You did a lot of work on it. mean, you said it’s not that difficult in some respects, but like when you think about the reasons and the push for it, was it student led employer institution? Like how did it really start?

 

Rodney Lee Parks (07:54.925)

Yeah.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (08:06.678)

It’s a, I’d say it’s a combination of all of those things. so early on the registrar’s office at Elon was seeing every graduating senior and making sure that they were registered for that final term classes. And so when students would come in here, we would commonly hear, you know, and we would show them their experiential transcript. They were like, I had no idea that I did all these things at Elon because we’re not

 

you know, students aren’t curating the record themselves. We are curating that for them behind the scenes. And so they were surprised. And then the next phrase that would come out of their mouth was, wow, I had no idea that I did these things, but I can use this whenever I do my interview, I can talk about these things. And so they began to understand that I was a vice president for an organization under the leadership. So leadership.

 

Vice President and what were the responsibilities that I did as Vice President. I did service, you know, and here’s the organization I did service, but linking to the page that did service, they could actually see these were the responsibilities that I did for this organization. Here was the presentation that I did and the slides associated with that presentation. Here’s the company I did. So here’s EY and the number of hours and then the job description of what they actually did for that company.

 

And so it was very robust to be able to see that for the student and to show them, you know, the graphics themselves from the registrar’s perspective. From that point, we went out to employers and said, Hey, will this be useful? And we published an article in NACE that said, you know, employers, you know, found it to be a useful document. They liked the fact that the institution was certifying that

 

these experiences actually occurred and are being certified by Elon University. I mean, my signature is on the experiential transcript the same way that is on the academic transcript. And so having it certified and knowing the high ratios of fraud that goes into a resume, now you have something from the institution say, we’re gonna put the institutional name behind this that they completed.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (10:27.052)

these competencies with this global education experience. And so each of those areas was able to really go through and identify the competencies and the outcomes and then have the students talk about what does intercultural competency look like with your global education experience. And that’s a great question to ask on an interview or to talk about what was it like to…

 

climb Kilimanjaro, what did you learn from climbing Kilimanjaro? What did you learn from the people of Tanzania? And what did you learn about yourself? And I hear over and over the students talking about Tanzania and climbing Kilimanjaro and saying, if I can accomplish that, I can accomplish anything. I have a new found drive that I can really work hard and accomplish the tasks in life.

 

And so it’s a lot of the things that they are beginning to put together to tell that comprehensive four -year academic co -curricular experience. And we don’t just say academic anymore. It’s that comprehensive four -year experience that includes the student affairs, leadership, all of those components built into your academic advising curriculum and built into your co -curricular experiential transcript.

 

Global education has that discussion. The academic advisors have that discussion. We use a model where faculty actually advise students their third and their fourth year. So they have that discussion. The Student Professional Development Center has that discussion. And so you have multiple touch points on campus that continue to be able to see that transcript and use that transcript and ask those very detailed questions. How will you use this to tell your story?

 

And that has helped tremendously. And going back and we have ambassadors that, you know, now they go into those first year seminar classes and they showcase their, you know, co -curricular experiential transcript. And of course, theirs looks pretty cool. You know, the average number of experiences for an Elon student is about eight. And so, you know, they, they’re very engaged on campus. They only have to do two, but they do a lot more than two.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (12:39.278)

Wow.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (12:47.366)

especially if they’re in leadership and they’re doing service for their organizations, fraternities, sororities, you know, they’re doing gap, you know, terms during their spring break. So they’re doing a ton of different things. It’s just a matter of us collecting that and putting it on their experiential transcript.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (13:07.393)

Well, you hit the nail on the head early on where, you know, you’re talking to students like I didn’t realize I did all this. It’s crazy to think how expensive higher education is. And when someone graduates, they get a diploma, they can order their transcript, but it’s really hard to actually define what their four to six years was. What did I really like? What was my experience really like? And the

 

Rodney Lee Parks (13:18.734)

Mm -hmm.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (13:28.361)

Right.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (13:32.858)

Part that I really like is that a lot of what employers are looking for are signals. Do I care that you got a B in philosophy 202? Not really. I want a signal that you work hard, you’re willing to take reasonable risks, you’re willing to try new things, you can communicate well. We’re just looking for easy signals that represent who you are.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (13:40.195)

Mm

 

Rodney Lee Parks (13:45.645)

Right.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (13:52.056)

Mm -hmm.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (14:02.464)

instead of telling me how many credits you got in a minor that doesn’t really communicate a whole lot. like for employers, one of the signals I can look at really quickly and for a student that just graduated for with an undergraduate degree, it’s I don’t probably have a ton of job experience. And so how do I communicate what I will be in my first job out of school? And this helps them do that instead of trying to make up stuff on your resume like

 

Rodney Lee Parks (14:22.414)

That’s right.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (14:26.508)

Mm -hmm.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (14:32.428)

assistant manager at a frozen yogurt shop. It’s like, well, what does that really mean? You know, I don’t have a ton of experience.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (14:37.023)

Yeah. I got Excel certification. I took an AI course, and this is what I learned in that AI course. I can program in this language. I was an engineer and during grand designs, these are some of the things that I accomplished in grand designs. Not every student will have that work experience, like you say, but they have experience in the creation of

 

projects and critical thinking and working with groups and working with teams and you just don’t get that with 30 characters on an academic transcript and we are long overdue for providing our students more information and helping them articulate that because for the longest time employers have said, know, higher education is not giving people the skills necessary to succeed.

 

I would probably argue they’re giving them the skills, but the students just can’t talk about those skills. They can’t talk about what they’ve learned and the duties and the responsibilities and the accomplishments and how they can critical think and accomplish things within teams or individually. Great writing and verbal articulation. There’s just so many things that go on with higher education that we don’t do a good job of capturing.

 

and then helping the student articulate that. And that’s a big piece of it. And that’s what employers were saying. It’s been interesting to the students when we showcased it to the students, it was really interesting because, you know, the employer said, this is great, provide more. We showed it to the students and they said, this is great, but how come this is not on my experiential transcript? They wanted even jobs that they were doing out in town to be reflected so we could certify.

 

Yes, I worked in the registrar’s office for X number of hours or for four years. they, they wanted even more of the experiences that they were having on campus, such as jobs or innovation or using the makerspace, you know, so there were a lot of others, you know, that they would actually love to see on the experiential transcript. And I suspect innovation will probably be one that Elon will move to in the, in the future as we continue to build places like

 

Rodney Lee Parks (17:00.012)

the makers make maker space and teach more classes related to AI and engineering and design and robotics and, you game design. They’re stated, they’re teaching all these really fascinating classes. And I think you’re going to really start to see more and more of that type of information, not just saying an AI course, but actually saying what they created and having them talk about that creation.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (17:28.058)

What I really appreciate about it too is it’s like a feedback loop to the institution and it’s almost like accountability. When you are applying or you go on campus, you’re a junior or senior in high school and you walk around, they’re not selling you on like, you could get four credits of this course here. It’s all about, you know,

 

Rodney Lee Parks (17:46.05)

Mm -hmm.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (17:52.248)

Really? No.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (17:54.934)

I don’t mean this negatively, but it’s about brand, right? It’s here’s what you get with the Elon experience. And most students walk away with just, you you have it in your head or you think, you know, I think this is the type of students that are leaving our institution with the CLR. You actually are living it out. You’re like, no, we, we are documenting.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (17:58.018)

hand.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (18:14.082)

Mm -hmm.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (18:19.276)

Right.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (18:21.812)

the global experiences of our students. We’re actually putting them in internships. Leadership is important to us. We’re documenting it. It’s not just a thing that we’re selling you during the admissions process, but there’s a deliverable on this. And then the student’s going to be able to communicate it tangibly based on this evidence. So that’s why I like it. It’s not just like this fake brand competition. It’s living out

 

Rodney Lee Parks (18:37.059)

Mm -hmm.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (18:49.88)

the values of the institution.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (18:52.044)

And it’s continuing to grow. know, like now, if you think about all the data that we capture in one place, we have taken that data and created what’s called, you know, like the comprehensive learner record where we give all that data back to the faculty. And so the faculty don’t have to, you know, know what type of student that they’re getting. They can actually see here’s the class most represented in the students in my class. Here’s the, you know, there’s students in this.

 

particular class tend to have an average GPA or there’s first generation students in my class or there’s an LGBT student.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (19:25.146)

That’s really interesting. So like a philosophy professor could look at their class and say, these are mostly engineering students taking this as like a gen net, you know, as part of their core.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (19:32.878)

That’s right. Yeah. They can change their pedagogy, you know, completely based on the students that are registered in their class. Their majors, their minors, it’s, you know, where they’ve done research, the types of service that they’ve done. It’s a really great comprehensive look at the students in their class. And we limit it to 10 so that, you you can’t identify the students and stuff like that. But it’s amazing when you think of it, you know, like, wow, would I really

 

How do I bring economics into my core class knowing that 18 out of 22 took an economics class? That’s probably something that I wanna talk about in my class. And then going even further, badges have been a big thing. But Elon, we don’t just give a badge for everything. We have a very detailed comprehensive form that captures

 

competencies and outcomes and what was studied and the number of hours. And so we capture all of that, you know, in this badge and each badge is uniquely created by the communications department at Elon. And so when you go on our website, you can see all of these branded badges that Elon has created that can then be turned around and put on an academic record. the next, you know, as we evolve and begin to think about innovation,

 

where do we begin to put these badges and then clicking on the badges and seeing what are the outcomes? What are the competencies? You what did the student learn? You know, is this continuing education that can, you know, help with certification for teachers or for human services or for social work, all of those that require continuing education units. And so being able to combine that.

 

traditional continuing education that’s offered through our continuing education division division. All of those are pieces now that are really combined with the registrar’s office as we continue to build out more of a comprehensive record. Even, you know, I, you know, here most recently we’ve launched something we call pennants, for example.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (21:46.796)

And these pennants, what they do is, you know, if you think about my generation, we all had pennants of our football teams and baseball teams on our wall. They speak directly to parents, right? I got the dean’s list and I got the president’s list. Institutions no longer have to send all of these files to local newspapers and say, you made the dean’s list, you made the president’s list. Now a student can upload that to social media.

 

They can show and they’re stackable, you know, all the way down. They’re stackable to say, I made the pre president’s list and Dean’s list. And if you click on it, it’ll tell information associated with what the president’s list or Dean’s list actually is for that term. can even embed the classes that they achieved for that term inside that, you know, that particular innovation. so even going forward, you know, if you think about, you know, parchment and instructor,

 

and the combination of the technologies across the board, students are going to have a wealth of information that they can begin to tell that Elon story. And it’s just going to continue to grow. We’ve already started the process of using AI to determine what does the common themes look like for students that withdraw from the institution. Now, Elon has a very high retention rate.

 

you know, if we hit 92%, we want to be 95%. You know, we want to be even higher. You know, we want the students to come in here and tell us, we do a lot of great things, but where are we? Where’s the areas that we can be even better? And so even the technologies all created out of the registrar’s office, even the technologies are beginning to shape and give back.

 

not just to the student, but to the institution as a whole. And so I think that’ll continue to grow. You’re going to see more with the academic catalog, know, scraping of the data, combining the competencies, storing those competencies, you know, there’s really the sky’s the limit. And now it’s just a matter of the soft cost and having time to continue to build that and the relationships that you have with our corporate vendors.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (24:06.606)

parchment, canvas, the Instructure umbrella, that’s going to create an amazing opportunity for us to bridge the gap to a lot of these technologies. And I like to talk about both bridging the gap and telling your story. Bridging the gap and telling your story. If we can get to that place as a group, as in support of one another.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (24:11.091)

and we will be with you at the end

 

Rodney Lee Parks (24:34.594)

we will really fundamentally change the story the students are actually telling in a good way on both sides.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (24:41.563)

And I think that’s a, I’m glad you highlighted that. And, you know, parchment historically, when we work with institutions like Elon, it’s been, it’s a comprehensive learner record for the Elon experience, right? For Elon students and, know, just to peel the curtain back for people. Now it’s becoming.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (24:55.062)

Mm -hmm. All right.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (25:03.63)

You know, the word comprehensive is kind of loaded, right? Comprehensive in your time at Elon, but how do we think about a comprehensive, call it whatever you want, learner record, passport, you know, whatever you want to comprehensive profile locker, anything you want to say, but how do we begin to think about better communication of the totality of the students like K through, you know,

 

Rodney Lee Parks (25:08.418)

Yeah.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (25:18.797)

Mm -hmm.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (25:29.378)

That’s right.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (25:30.138)

K through 20 experience or whatever it may be. And that to me is a challenge because yes, we have the comprehensive learner record for Elon, but let’s say I transferred in in my junior year or I earned some badges somewhere else, you know, took a few courses at community college and then my high school experience that to me is like the, the North star, right? Like, where do we want to go? Like, how do we have

 

Rodney Lee Parks (25:54.754)

Mm -hmm.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (25:57.976)

documentation without it getting too messy because it’s us to communicate something. And do I really want my, you know, fifth grade experience, you know, how valuable. that’s kind of the question is what should be brought in? How is, you know, that’s just technology a lot of times, but how do you view that when you think about what comprehensive means taking experiences from other places? How do you view that? And,

 

Rodney Lee Parks (26:02.7)

Yeah, yeah.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (26:27.172)

Where do you think we should be going?

 

Rodney Lee Parks (26:29.048)

You think about it a lot of, you know, for years we’ve taken transfer credit, we’ve taken IB credit, you know, we’ve taken AP credit, you know, as we begin to grow these experiential opportunities, there’s no reason why we can’t also post those experiential opportunities, you know, to an academic record as a type of transfer educational, you know, component.

 

And so it may not be fifth grade, you know, that’s probably not, you know, as far as we want to go back. But if you’re a junior or senior and you’re really, you want to be competitive, you know, if you were to transfer a junior or senior level work on something that looks like an academic transcript with IB and, you know, AP, some of those things, if you were to able to transfer that, you know, to another educational institution, we can OCR that right into the system.

 

and provide that type of credit and potentially give that student a head start. We already have an opportunity to give you credit for learner experience. So prior learning experience, giving credit to high school students for APEIB, giving credit to students for stuff like experiential learning. And so the more we’re able to give that student a head start at the institution,

 

the more that they will engage themselves in other opportunities. And so if you build, if you even start building from, you’re gonna have to probably draw the line, but if you start building from the junior level of high school, that’s gonna be an easy transition right into college because that’s when they start taking AP classes, right? They’re starting to take AP classes a little bit later in high school. And that’s gonna be an opportunity for us to grow those things and…

 

really be able to set apart the students that fit our paradigm. If we see a student that’s deeply embedded in experiential learning and they have excellent grades, all of those pieces are going to say that student’s probably going to be very successful at Elon University. And so our recruitment can then be tailored towards the students that will be the most successful at the institution.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (28:48.35)

And faculty can then begin to really embed a lot of those experiences in the pedagogy of the classroom itself. So we have an opportunity to go back a little ways and then go forward and really build out what that educational experience truly is. They could talk about the transition. They can talk about the transition into college.

 

They can talk about the challenges that they faced in college through that transition and then how those challenges position themselves for success going forward. So there’s a tremendous opportunity for them to really take that full look of what we’ve given you from an education and experiential standpoint and bridge all of those gaps together. I think, kind of go back, the sky’s the limit and the more we are able to

 

Matthew Sterenberg (29:21.996)

like this and I’ll see you in a few.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (29:44.802)

Like you said, if we create a locker or we create a new type of portfolio that’s used by the campus and we market it, you know, lot of times we miss the marketing campaign opportunity. We’re marketing Elon with every time we send out electronic diploma, every time we send out an academic or co -curricular transcript. When those students are posting that to their, you know, social media accounts, it’s communicating a type of marketing for the institution itself.

 

So it’s not just the faculty, it’s not just the student in their four year curriculum, it’s also marketing, you know, Elon University and painting ourselves as a very different university than the traditional universities that we’ve seen for the past hundred years. Back when we were handwriting transcripts, but you know, and we’re, we’re still limited to 30 characters, you know, but.

 

There is so much more opportunity that we can give the students with the technology that we use these days.

 

Matthew Sterenberg (30:47.119)

Well, I really appreciate you joining me and sharing your experience and the full kind of journey of how you got there. I feel like there’s a renewed interest. You know, I think post COVID, know, there’s people are able to dream a little bit more about what what’s next. I think it’s going to continue to evolve. So really appreciate you joining me.

 

Rodney Lee Parks (31:07.178)

Absolutely, bring it on. Tell other registrars, bring it on.

 

 

There’s always more to learn.