New computer protocols being developed by a U.S. Department of Education task force soon could make it easy to exchange student transcripts and other information electronically from one school district to another, from a school district to a college, or from a school district to a state or federal government agency.

Currently, it can take up to two weeks for schools to receive the transcripts of students who transfer to another district or state, school officials say. The delay often means school officials don't have the information they need to place students in the appropriate classes right away, and valuable education time is lost.

But cutting-edge information sharing environments like those used in the federal Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) program can make possible the near-instant transfer of this information, regardless of what type of student information system a school district uses, according to Ray Yeagley, superintendent of Rochester, N.H., School District and chairman of the National Center for Education Statistics' EDI Task Force.

"I think this type of thing is inevitable," Yeagley told eSchool News. "We all want to cut down on paper and eliminate the errors that occur when sets of information have to be entered repeatedly. But more important to the students is the fact that it speeds up what happens with their information."

According to the National Center for Education Statistics web site, EDI is "the exchange of routine business transactions in a computer-processable format, covering such traditional applications as inquiries, planning, purchasing, ... , financial reporting—and now, education information."

The initiative actually began in 1979, when the American National Standards Institute chartered a new committee—now known as the Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) X12, Electronic Data Interchange—to develop uniform standards for electronic interchange of business transactions.

EDI standards were created to solve the problems that arise when widely varying formats used by trading partners hinder the efficient exchange of electronic information. But forward-thinking educators saw the implications of these standards for use in K-12 schools as well.

"There are more than 100 different student information programs used in schools, [programs] such as Chancery's Mac School and NCS's SASI," Yeagley said. "But with such a disparate community of users, it has not been practical until now to create an EDI" standard for the education community.

Once EDI is generally accepted among schools, Yeagley said, it will reduce the staff time required to send high school transcripts to colleges, enable schools receiving transfer students to have virtually instant access to academic information that is critical to their placement, and facilitate the direct transmission of state and federal reports without introducing errors from manual data entry.

How EDI works