In June, the members of the Holistic Credit Mobility Acceleration Cohort met for the third time to share best practices and advance credit mobility through improvements in process, policy, and technology. Each learning session is dedicated to exploring one of the pillars of the Holistic Credit Mobility framework, and the June session focused on institutional strategies to strengthen non-credit to credit pathways and Credit for Prior Learning (CPL).

June’s session featured presentations from the Education and Employment Research Center (EERC) at Rutgers University, Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL), and the Ohio Department of Higher Education (ODHE). All three organizations touched on key themes for developing CPL policies and formalizing non-credit to credit pathways: strong data infrastructure, clear and standardized CPL institutional policies, and committed cross-sector partnership with institutions and industry partners.

To dig further into how to develop robust CPL policies and non-credit to credit pathways, we interviewed the speakers from ODHE for this blog post: Lisa Holstrom, Senior Associate Director for the Ohio Technical Center Degree Pathways; Ben Parrot, Senior Associate Director of Secondary Career-Technical Alignment Initiative Implementation; and Jared Shank, Senior Director of Military and Apprenticeship Initiatives and Special Projects. They discuss ODHE’s efforts to develop scalable non-credit to credit pathways, the industry partnerships critical to this work, and the steps required to ensure a successful cross-sector collaboration.

The acceleration cohort will continue meeting throughout the year, with the next two learning sessions focused on communication strategies and weaving yearlong efforts into a sustainable action plan. The final session, taking place in January 2026, will bring cohort members together in person to celebrate their progress and mark the conclusion of the cohort.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Can you elaborate on the vision behind the Ohio Department of Education’s (ODHE) Military Transfer Assurance Guide (MTAG), Industry Recognized Credential Transfer Assurance Guide (ITAG), and OTC Degree Pathways initiatives? What are the most significant benefits and key features institutional leaders should understand about the various non-credit to credit pathways developed so far?

Lisa Holstrom: Our vision is about creating a statewide network that serves students and supports the state’s educational goals. We want to be a national leader in credit mobility and acknowledging learning that happens through experience and working as well. Our mission is really to enable students to reach their highest level of academic attainment and career aspirations by facilitating the seamless process of statewide and national learning credit mobility initiatives, enhanced statewide curricula, and comprehensive pathways built and maintained through collaboration. So anything that our unit takes on, we think about how it’s serving students and how faculty are involved in making sure that they’re driving the process and not us. We also have the Ohio Transfer Promise, which is a set of outcomes that we expect every public institution in Ohio to achieve and they all have signed off on. It’s a firm guarantee that institutions will honor our statewide transfers and those courses that have been identified as equivalents in our statewide transfer system. The fact that every institution signed off on this, that this is a part of their promise to their students is really important to us.

Ben Parrot: A lot of the work for initiatives our team oversees began decades ago, primarily with transfer. Our team originally focused on overseeing transfer initiatives between Ohio’s public colleges and universities. Over time, our team began taking on articulation credit initiatives tied to other types of learning experiences. That included things like AP—something most institutions were already doing—but we also started to recognize there are all sorts of other learning experiences that deserve college credit. We now have an initiative that awards college credit for career-technical coursework at the high school, or secondary, level. The OTC degree pathways are really a natural offshoot of that—looking at students coming from adult career-technical training programs. We also recognize that students are learning all kinds of things in the military—that’s where MTAGs come in. And then ITAGs, one of our newest initiatives, is really about recognizing that people are learning a lot on the job. A lot of this has been about following national trends in how credit mobility is being discussed.

Jared Shank: One phrase I always use when talking about the military is that our goal from the very beginning has been to treat military students just like any other student in the state of Ohio, and to treat their institution—the military—like any other public college or university. Everything we’ve done with them follows the same processes we use for all our other credit initiatives. We’ve just slightly tailored it to fit the military context. So, just like all our schools submit coursework for evaluation, we submit military coursework the same way. We use the same mechanisms, the same processes, the same vision. And I think that’s why it works—it’s a system that’s tried and true.

How can institutions cultivate external partnerships to develop similar non-credit to credit pathways and what specific steps can they take to initiate those conversations?

Lisa: It’s really important for us to stay connected to employer needs, which can vary a lot by region. Taking a purely statewide lens doesn’t always make sense. We’ve got a lot of rural areas, for example, where manufacturing may not be top of mind. So listening—whether through listening sessions or meetings with major regional employers—is really important. But you also have to have faculty at the table. It helps when they can hear directly from employers, rather than us serving as an intermediary. When faculty can ask questions in real time, they’re more likely to see the connections between industry-led training and their own course content. When it comes to our non-credit to credit work, we focus on making sure a credential, military experience, or training program—like those from the OTC degree pathways—helps students progress in their major. It’s important that the credit is applicable to the degree, and in many cases, the major. Not just filling an elective slot. I also think institutions should think broadly about their stakeholders. K–12 is often overlooked, but they can be a really valuable partner—especially in career-tech programs, where advisory boards are often made up of industry reps. Networking works for professionals, of course, but it also works for institutions and state agencies. So track who you want to partner with—and figure out who they partner with—so you can build those connections strategically. For example, credential providers can often help facilitate conversations with their broader network.

Jared: There are some great tools out there—like the American Council on Education (ACE) Military Guide or the Community College of the Air Force catalog—that can help you figure out how military experience translates into college credit. If [an industry] is open to hiring veterans, we can take that information and look at what military roles align with [engineering] degrees. If we already have MTAGs that apply to something like electrical engineering technology, we can go back to the schools—or even directly to the industry partner—and say, “Here are the military occupations you should be engaging with.” Because those veterans might already have a semester or more of relevant training under their belt from their military experience. So, tools like the ACE Guide become a way to identify the best-fit candidates and make that translation work, both for institutions and employers.

How do you measure the success and impact of these pathways? What metrics are important to consider and are there any specific metrics on your wishlist you’d like to track?

Lisa: That’s one of the reasons we’re partnering with Ithaka S+R, right? To get the technology and accurate data sources in place to answer some of the research questions we have. One thing we do track is the number of aligned courses at institutions for each initiative. So we know, by institution and by initiative, how many aligned courses they should have, and how many they actually do have. We track those things—we call that “compliance”—when 100 percent of their eligible courses on the list are approved as equivalencies. We also count the number of credit hours that institutions actually award. That’s based on institutional reporting, so we hope it’s accurate. But it’s also dependent on the timing and accuracy of how institutions report transfer credit. And non-credit to credit is a little trickier to code in the system than, say, course-to-course transfer credit. Still, we do look at that data closely and watch for trends.

Now, metrics we wish we had—or metrics we think are really important to consider—include things like return on investment. And I mean ROI from the student’s perspective. Are they earning a livable wage from the job they secured as a result of the degree they paid for? That’s their ROI. But there’s also institutional and state ROI—like, based on scholarships awarded, are we seeing increases in graduation, completion rates, and workforce entry? Or even things like increased employee tax revenue. Are people going from unemployed to employed and now paying taxes because of that degree? Another is: are students with ITAGs graduating faster than those without? Is prior learning assessment accelerating time to degree? And even more fundamentally, are they completing at all? Can we say students with ITAGs or military credit complete degrees at higher rates than those without any prior learning on their record?

Jared: Part of it is that we’d need to create or develop new fields in the data system. And then we’d need to make sure all the institutions are informed and train them on how to do it. If it’s not a field that already exists in the system, then getting it established is a long process. Then you have to get institutions to actually start reporting it. ROI is also especially hard, because parts of it involve reaching into employment data—like industries, wages—that’s not always within our scope or control. So I think the challenges are partly technical and partly logistical.

Ben: I’d add that our statewide data system just has limitations—like any system does. Tracking longitudinal data, in particular, can be really challenging because of how the system functions. And then there’s just the workload. For a lot of this, we can’t pull the data ourselves—we’d need someone from the data team to do it. But, as you can imagine, there are a lot of competing priorities at a state agency. They only have so much time in a day, and sometimes our requests aren’t the top priority. Workload at institutions is also a factor. We’ve been doing outreach to help improve the accuracy of that reporting, and we’ve seen some real improvements from many schools over the past few semesters. But some are still struggling and likely will for a while. When so many different people are contributing to the data, it just gets messy. I think that’s true for most systems.

If you could offer one key piece of advice to other institutions interested in developing similar policies, what would that be?

Lisa: [Creating a] culture of collaboration and trust, especially to get faculty buy-in. In places where faculty don’t feel trusted or where they suspect things are happening behind their backs, there’s naturally going to be distrust. And those are the places where you’ll see resistance to participating in initiatives. We—and I mean the agency—have done a Herculean amount of work over the past 30 years or so to build that culture of collaboration and trust among faculty. So when we introduce a new initiative, like ITAGs or pathways for military credit, it’s really a slam dunk. Faculty may have a few questions about how implementation will work, but they don’t push back on the concept. They trust us.

Ben: I’d add that collaboration happens at different levels. We’re working with faculty experts who make curricular decisions, institutional leadership who weigh in on high-level policy decisions, and boots-on-the-ground folks in student services and transfer offices who are directly working with students. And all of those groups are collaborating with each other at their institutions. That kind of cross-functional collaboration is essential to building trust and sustaining faculty and staff buy-in. Even if someone is working at an institution without strong state-level support for statewide initiatives, a lot can still happen if senior leadership, faculty, and student services staff are all willing to work together. It’s not about senior leadership imposing something on faculty, or faculty wanting to lead something but getting no support. Both sides need to be at the table for things to really work.

Jared: This is especially important because we’re a coordinating agency, not a governing one. You have to get their support—otherwise, it just won’t happen. Even in the process of building that support, we’ve created mechanisms to hear concerns and feedback. Almost all of our initiatives have something like an endorsement survey. That gives us a final opportunity to surface and address legitimate concerns. It all goes back to trust—making sure institutions feel like they’ve had a voice, that their perspectives are valued, and that we can move forward together.

Are there specific aspects of the Holistic Credit Mobility framework that you believe are particularly relevant or challenging for ODHE to implement?

Lisa: This is really why we’re here—why we’re working with the Ithaka team. Ideally, we want a technology system that can drive all of this forward. Students should be able to see how the building blocks connect—how the ITAGs work with the CTAGs, how those connect to degree pathways, how military credit fits in—and how it all applies to, say, the University of Cincinnati’s criminal justice degree. And we can’t do that without a good technology system behind it—one that tracks equivalencies and helps apply them to a specific degree program. Right now, as you know, the big challenge is navigating all the different SIS systems our institutions are using. We’re not a state system like some other states, so every institution is free to choose their own SIS. Pulling data and building a system that can actually connect to those various data systems is a challenge we’ve already identified and one you’re already familiar with.

Ben: I’d also add that under the Responsive Practice pillar, we noted another major challenge: communication is just really hard—especially at the state level. We have to get the word out to so many different stakeholders, and there’s constant turnover at the institutions. It’s really tough to get the right information into the hands and minds of the right people. We can create all these great initiatives, but if academic advisors don’t know they exist, then they’re not asking the right questions when students come in. That means a lot of students who are eligible for credit might never access it—just because they have no idea it’s available to them. And trying to do outreach directly to students is difficult too. At the state level, we have limited channels. That’s really the core motivation for our participation in this project: the technology and data issues. But also, the communication piece of the credit mobility framework has been an ongoing challenge. We’re trying to keep brainstorming new ways to get the word out—to reach the right audiences—and we’re just doing our best.

Was there any surprising or unexpected insight shared during the session, and how do you see it influencing your approach to your initiatives?

Lisa: One of our biggest takeaways is that we just need to keep hearing what other people are up to because it pushes us to try new things and think differently. It challenges us to shift our paradigm—not necessarily change it entirely, but at least reframe how we approach the work. From that perspective, it was really valuable. I also appreciate the data. It shows what metrics matter, what’s being measured nationally, and even if we don’t have all the data on hand, it helps us reflect on where we think we stand. The priorities that come through when people talk about the data—those are important too. I just find research presentations really engaging and thought-provoking and appreciated that part of the session.

Jared: In Ohio, we’re always looking for ways to award credit for all kinds of learning—knowledge, experience, training—you name it. We’re trying to develop initiatives that reach every audience or group we can think of. So hearing what other states or institutions are doing is really helpful. It gets us thinking: Hey, they’re doing this—can we do something similar? Is this a population we haven’t considered yet? It’s that kind of reflection that leads to good takeaways.

Ben: It’s also really encouraging to get positive feedback on the things we’re doing here in Ohio. A lot of the time, we just take our work for granted—like, this is just how we do things. But then we hear from others in the cohort who say, “Wow, that’s really cool,” and it reminds us that what we’re building can be a national model. That’s motivating, but it also gives us a sense of responsibility.