Three hundred and seventy thousand. That is how many students and alumni make up the UCI community. And it’s also the number of individuals at UCI that may at some point need to request a copy of their official transcript records from the University.

In November, UCI made this process a lot easier when it launched a new electronic transcript service for all students and alumni. Anyone who has attended UCI can now electronically request and receive a copy of their official transcripts digitally, in a fraction of the time it took to print and mail physical copies.

Prior to this new service, the only way for the Registrar’s Office to fulfill these vital document requests after COVID-19 moved campus operations remotely, was for some office staff to return to campus to manually fulfill the requests.

“It became imperative that the Registrar’s Office move to an electronic transcript delivery service in order to minimize staff presence on campus, while still delivering official records to students and alumni,” said John Lapuz, Assistant Registrar.

Since launching, this service has already saved the Registrar’s Office many hours in staff effort along with other costs. Over one thousand digital and paper transcripts were processed in the first week of the service being available, representing a three-fold increase in transcript requests over the same time last year.

Partnering to bring technology solutions to life

While electronic transcripts are the standard at many institutions, UCI’s student system presented the team with significant challenges – take 370,000 records from over 50 years of student data from a complex, outdated system and make it available through a vendor product. Overcoming these challenges became the Registrar IT team’s primary focus, both to allow staff to work safely at home, and to provide students with quick service and easier access to their official transcripts for their needs.

“We could not have delivered a 5-month implementation without the tremendous work of the [OIT Registrar’s IT] team,” said Lapuz. “This benefit to the University community is invaluable and for that we are thankful.”

One of the ways that COVID has impacted the campus is to really clarify priorities. Projects that were on the roadmap for the future suddenly became mission critical today. While discussions about bringing on a vendor to provide a certified, digital version of UCI transcripts actually began earlier in the year, this project was re-prioritized shortly after COVID forced staff to work remotely. The completion of the project this month successfully introduced modern services for our students, saving time, money and effort for staff as well.

“This is a huge benefit for the campus, provides a much-desired service to our students, and reduces the in-person requirements for Registrar’s Office staff during the COVID pandemic,” said Joshua Jackson, manager of Registrar IT in UCI’s Office of Information Technology. “This project was a success because of the expertise demonstrated by OIT and our functional partners in Registrar’s Office.”