SDCE Universal Transcript Initiative

The scope of our project defines a primary goal of producing an digital printable student transcript (PDF) with data drawn from one or more ODS’s in an electronic form that can be validated using blockchain technology. As it turns out, we don’t need any standards-based file format for the digital printable transcript to achieve this. We have chosen to embed underlying transcript data in a structured format within the printable PDF, but could use any reasonable format for this.
An additional minor goal for this prototype is to be able to write out a transcript in a non-printable structured file, and this is where a standard file layout would be useful. The thought was, since we are going to pull student transcript data from an ODS for a printable transcript file, we could add an option to produce a non-printable digital form of the student transcript where a school district could manually transfer this file to another education agency as opposed to (or in addition to) sending paper records. Using a standard transcript file definition makes sense here. We’re not creating or using a transfer mechanism, nor intending to demonstrate that the structured transcript file be imported or ingested by an ODS or any particular student data system.