Tennessee Electronic Transcript Exchange – Simplified

Clearinghouse implementation experts illustrate sending transcripts to other institutions through the Exchange. They’ll also share best practices and resources.

This lesson was presented to transcript fulfillment staff at Tennessee secondary schools.

Presentation FAQs (pdf) Transcript Welcome to Getting started with the Tennessee Electronic Transcript Exchange. We’ll cover how to process and send your students transcripts to postsecondary institutions. Lets go ahead and get started learning about sending transcripts for your students. We will start at the beginning with uploading transcript files into your secure FTP account. As a user, you may or may not have access to the SFTP account but someone in your organization does have the ability to upload this data to us. To access the SFTP web interface, go to studentclearinghouse.org and click FTP login. Enter your user name and password. If it’s the first time you’ve logged in, you will be provided with a temporary password. You will be prompted to create a new password upon login. Click “Sign On”. Once you’re signed in, you will come to the home page. Click the Upload button to launch the upload wizard. Drag and drop files into the Drop files to add or Browse… box or you can click Browse, locate and select the file you wish to upload and click Open. Please do not include any information in the notes section. Notes will not be delivered to staff at the National Student Clearinghouse. Contact us at K‐20transcripts@studentclearinghouse.org, if you wish to provide information on a recent transcript data submission. Click the “Upload” button. If you prefer, you can also drag and drop your files into the home folder. You will receive an email in about an hour to let you know if the upload was successful or if it had errors. If the file does have errors please reach out to us via email so we can assist you. Now we will look at how to send a transcript. We will cover sending one students transcript to a single school or multiple schools as well as sending multiple students transcripts to one school. The workflow is very similar in both scenarios. Start by logging into the transcript center at tn.transcriptcenter.com. Your username is your email address and we recommend you type in the password instead of copying and pasting. If you do forget your password, select the “Forgot your password?” link. Selecting this link will direct you to a page where you are prompted to enter your username. After providing your username, select the “Submit” button. Upon submission of your username, you will receive an email containing a link to reset your password. If you find yourself locked out of your account please email k-20transcripts@studentclearinghouse.org from the email address associated with your account asking us to unlock it for you. Upon successful login, you will find yourself on the dashboard. We will talk about 4 of these sections today. The items requiring attention section is basically your to-do list, it will display all of the items that have come in from online sources. The send student documents section is where you will send the transcripts from, whether it is one students transcript or multiple students transcripts. Manage student documents is where you can access and manage documents that have already been uploaded. As a high school you may not receive many documents but in the case you do this is where you will manage them. Down here you will see the top ten destinations for your transcripts. Once you start sending transcripts these numbers will populate and give you a snapshot of popular schools for your students orders. This is a cycle that will display the information for the last 30 days. We will now send a document. Select Send One Student Document link from the Send Student Documents section. Under the section titled Available Students, you will see a list of students already loaded into the Transcript Center. The list can be sorted by Last Name, First Name, grade and more to make it easier to locate the exact student. To view the transcript record of any one student click on the PDF icon on the right, this will pull up the actual document for your review. On the far right the attachments button- You can add an attachment here, something like a letter of recommendation to be sent along with the transcript. Please note that the added attachments will remain and be sent with all transcripts for that student. We are going to move forward with selecting a student. Select the radio button to the left of the students name. The student has now appeared in the selected student area above. If this is the correct student, click the next button. We are now going to select the recipient. If you have not yet delivered transcripts to any institutions via the Transcript Center, the “Institutions” tab will be presented by default for you to search for and designate the institution or institutions to which you wish to deliver this student’s transcript. For this example, we will send the transcript to Hometown University. To search for an institution you may type in the full or partial name of the institution in the Name field. As a helpful tip we recommend selecting the state to make sure you get the correct Hometown University. You can also search/sort Hometown University by the Type field (Post-secondary). Again this will just allow you to narrow down your recipients a little further. Once you have the schools located you can hit the select button on one or multiple recipients for this students transcript. After you successfully send your first student’s transcript to another institution, the Most Frequently Used Recipients tab will identify recipients that you deliver transcripts to most often. Once selected, the institution will display in the “Recipients” list. Select “Next” to review and complete your transcript delivery. Review the details of your delivery to ensure the correct student’s transcript is delivered to the desired institution. You may include a message with your delivery. However, this is an optional feature and is not required to complete the delivery process. Select the “Send” button to complete the delivery process. The final page will display a confirmation of your transcript delivery. The confirmation page shows a Tracking number for each transcript delivered, which can be referenced to easily inquire about the status of any delivery. You may select the “Send Another Record” button to perform the process again for another student, or the “Done” button to return to your Transcript Center home page. The scenario we have just covered is how you would send a transcript if a student has come to you directly to ask you to send a transcript on their behalf. Maybe they filled out a form or came into the office. Now we are going to cover a few scenarios when an order comes into you from an online source. Maybe an order comes in from orderatranscript.com. If you have not published this ordering site on your website we recommend doing so. The online portal is for students or alumni to place a request. There is no fee for either the student or the school. The site will provide tracking numbers and email notification's during the process to the student or alumni. For scenarios when a order has come from an institution we will process with FERPA compliance and it again is very similar to what we have already shown you. First, login to your Transcript Center user account. Once you are logged in, select the option, “Transcript Orders,” from the Items Requiring Attention section. You will see a small difference, you now have an order awaiting your processing. I will show you how to complete this order and the process is very similar for all orders that come in from an online source. Here we will note that in the items requiring attention there is an inbound request, this means it has come from an institution. You will click on inbound request. The resulting page will display all requests in an open status. These will be requests that have not yet been fulfilled or rejected. This example displays the pending request’s status as Awaiting fulfillment. Before fulfilling the transcript request, review the information provided by the requesting institution to determine whether or not your institution is permitted to disclose the student’s record in accordance with FERPA. In particular, review the responses provided in the ‘Applied?’ And ‘Maintain Consent?’ columns. The ‘Applied?’ column indicates whether or not the student applied for enrollment to the requesting institution. Recall that FERPA permits the disclosure of a student’s record to another institution when the student has applied for enrollment. The ‘Maintain Consent?’ column indicates whether or not the requesting institution was provided with consent from the student to obtain their education record from other institutions. The requesting institution may have attached the student’s consent form to the request if consent was obtained. Once you have gathered enough information to take action on the request, select the checkbox to the left of the request. Once selected, the response options below the table will become active. Reject: The Reject option may be selected for a variety of reasons. For instance, you may Reject the request when the requested student cannot be located by your institution with the information provided. You may also reject the request if you are uncomfortable disclosing the student’s record to the requesting institution (the Requestor). Once the Reject option is selected, a prompt will display requiring you to provide a reason for rejecting the request, which will be provided to the requesting institution. Rejecting a request is final for the particular request. The requesting institution may submit a new request for the student’s record to potentially receive an alternate response. Hold for Fees: The Hold for Fees option is an Open or Pending status. An Open/Pending status means that the response is tentative, and may be changed to a Closed status, like Reject or Fulfill, at a later date. The Hold for Fees option may be selected if the student owes fees to your high school, which you require to be reconciled prior to releasing the student’s record to the requesting institution. Once the Hold for Fees option is selected, a prompt will display requesting you to provide a reason for placing a hold on the request for this student’s record. After the student rectifies their fees owed to your institution, you may return to the request to fulfill it. Hold for Grades: Much like, Hold for Fees, the Hold for Grades option is an Open or Pending status. The Hold for Grades option may be selected when the student’s record is located, but the grades are not yet complete for the current term. This response option may be used most often when the Urgency of the request is indicated as “End of term,” which signifies that the requesting institution expects end of term grades to be included in the transcript provided to them. Once the Hold for Grades option is selected, a prompt will display requesting you to provide a reason for placing a hold on the request for this student’s record. As soon as the student’s grades are complete for the term, you may return to the request to fulfill it. Fulfill: The Fulfill option may be selected when the student’s record is located, and no holds or concerns prohibit you from fulfilling the request. Once the Fulfill option is selected, you will be directed to the next page, where the student record may be located within the Transcript Center. The resulting page will display the requested student’s information in the “Requested Student” section. Transcript Center will search the records currently available from your institution to determine whether any records match the information provided in the request. In this example, the information in the request partially matches information for one record from your institution and displays the Matching Student Documents tab. The matching student information is emphasized in bold text. If the service did not locate a matching record itself, you may select the tab, Search for a Student Document to search through the available records previously uploaded by your institution for a potential match. Once you have a matching record, select it using the radio button and click “Upload” to move that record to the ‘Selected Student’. If a matching record cannot be located in Transcript Center, but one exists in your Student Information System, you may add the record to Transcript Center by sending it via your secure FTP account. Once selected, the record will display in the “Selected Student” section. Select “Next” to review and complete your transcript delivery. Before completing the fulfillment process for this request, review the details to ensure that you will be delivering the requested student’s transcript to the institution. You may include a message with your delivery. However, this is an optional feature, and is not required to complete the delivery process. Select the “Send” button to complete the delivery process. The final page will display a confirmation indicating that you successfully fulfilled the request. The confirmation page will include a Tracking number, which can be referenced to easily inquire about the status of any request. You may select “Fulfill Another Request” to perform the process again for another request, or “Done” to return to your Transcript Center home page. Each tutorial is just a few minutes long and provides step-by-step instructions for each Transcript Center task.