My Role and Project Background
The Veterans Education Transfer System (VETS) was the first online resource in the United States to provide education information, credit transfer services, and career support specifically for veterans and service members. I was brought on to the project to help produce layouts and a prototype in 2009 when it was nothing more than a series of conversations.
The primary goal of the project was to help veterans and service members to find out what academic credit is available from Minnesota State colleges and universities based on their military occupation and military training. The project expanded to include out education and career planning, along with financial and policy resources, and to make possible easy connections and conversations with all of thirty-three of the colleges and universities Minnesota State system. The prototype that I helped to design became a live site in September 2010 and has since then evolved to include nearly all of the features and ideas that we originally had planned to build.
Methods and Strategy
We were working on small publicly funded higher education budget and a tight timeline to show value and gain support. This meant that we didn’t have much extra time for design charrettes, content-agnostic wireframes, or conversations with our target audience. Instead, we relied on layouts that were heavy on brand, color, and content, then moved from these quickly to a clickable prototype developed in Dreamweaver, and from this to a functional site that was tied to the all the course database(s) for all of the schools in the system.
I handled all the design work and built the prototype, but I did not write any of the code to query the databases.
Early wireframe showing VETS Home page
Because it was impossible to code for all of the military branches and all of the military applications given our limited resources, we developed the prototype to include only three Army occupations: 31B military police, 63B light wheel vehicle mechanic, and 68W health care specialist. The prototype included the three other primary service branches (Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps), but this was only for purposes of including all groups in the prototype experience and not because we had resources to match any of their service occupations with school credit.
VETS Home page
Connecting my prototype to the schools allowed us to provide a fully functional credit transfer experience, or at least our best guess at what a credit transfer experience would be like. Coding (PHP, SQL, and Java) was not my responsibility, but I was heavily involved in making sense of the different ways that the schools had organized their data and named their programs so that we could write queries that were asking the correct questions of the correct tables in order to obtain meaningful search results.
For instance, let’s say that twenty-five of the thirty-three schools all had a nursing program that could lead to an RN degree, but the remaining eight had nursing programs that only led to training for certification as an emergency medical technician or to fulfilling credits towards an RN degree. In this case, in order to be accurate and inclusive, we would need to match up the related military service occupations (e.g. 68W health care specialist) with the actual nursing programs and those programs that only provided training and certifications. This required us to first establish the match between military service occupation and school programs before we could even begin to write code and pull data.
Some of this work is shown in the spreadsheet image below.
Excel spreadsheet showing export of the MNSCU course program databases for all thirty-three schools and including some of the nursing programs
Solutions and Delivery
Having successfully socialized the prototype layout and gotten sign-off from marketing and Web content groups and having done a lot of work on our own to map school course catalogs to military education and school programs to military occupations, we still had to get agreement from campus and system officials on four critical pieces of information.
Was our mapping of school program to military occupation accurate
Was our interpretation of school courses and correlation of these courses with military training accurate
Were our transfer estimates acceptable for presentation purposes
Were there any requests for additional features
The answers were yes, the programs and occupations had been mapped accurately; yes, courses and military training had been mapped well enough for the prototype, but not good enough for a public site; yes, the transfer estimates were acceptable but would require a lot of discussion with registrars in order to get agreement before going public; and yes, more features please. We were satisfied. The prototype was gaining champions and getting positive press. We worked quickly to add the requested features including methods for comparing schools and programs, addition of criteria and designations for online programs, programs that were participants in the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) Program, schools that were Service Members Opportunity Colleges (SOC), and callouts for CareerOneStop labor market information. There was also a request to add a page that provided a map to allow users to search for programs and schools visually and regionally within the state system. We added the new features and pages to the prototype, presented the final version, and the funds were subsequently provided to develop a full and complete online service for all military branches and occupations mapped to all of the state colleges and universities.
