A wall covered with colorful sticky notes arranged around a hand-drawn sketch of a person’s head. Blue tape arrows point toward the head from different directions. The sticky notes contain handwritten phrases such as “Hurdles,” “identify student segments,” “evaluating resources,” “connecting digital resources,” and other brainstorming ideas, suggesting a collaborative planning or problem-solving session.

ITHAKA Labs scouts new ways to expand access to education and knowledge, through research and development, product discovery, lean business development, and service incubation. We partner with colleagues across ITHAKA along with higher education institutions, funders, community organizations, publishers, and libraries to develop and test interventions and achieve impact that can scale.

Formerly known as JSTOR Labs, ITHAKA Labs initially partnered with publishers and libraries to explore the future of research and teaching through the development of inspirational and useful prototypes. Today, the scope of this work has grown beyond research and teaching to encompass the entire mission of ITHAKA: to improve access to knowledge and education for people around the world. The engineers, UX designers, and subject experts behind Labs incubate new services, build tools and products, and invest in initiatives that align with this mission.

Labs works on projects ranging from early-stage research to production platforms. We emphasize learning, iteration, and sharing outcomes. We’re embedded in projects and programs across Ithaka S+R and continue to stand up new services.

Transfer Explorer

Today’s students are more mobile than ever before. A striking 45 percent of associate degree holders and 67 percent of bachelor degree holders have transcripts with learning from multiple institutions. To help ensure all those credits count toward a credential, we launched Transfer Explorer, a national credit mobility website.

How does it work?

Transfer Explorer allows users to build a record of prior learning and see how that record would transfer and count toward the requirements for degrees and certificates at the institutions we work with. We’ve established an automated data feed for each Transfer Explorer member school that regularly provides evaluated course equivalencies, course catalog information, and program requirements from student information systems, degree audit software, and other relevant source systems. Any updates to the institutions’ source systems will be automatically and regularly reflected on Transfer Explorer. The data integration from member colleges is powered by CampusAPI Requisite and Equivalency services from the nonprofit DXtera Institute.

JSTOR Access in Prison

JSTOR is a trusted digital library used by 14,000+ higher education institutions worldwide. The JSTOR Access in Prison initiative, launched in 2007, extends this access to correctional education programs—bringing peer-reviewed scholarship to students working toward GEDs, CTE certificates, and college degrees inside correctional facilities.

We partner with correctional education programs and Departments of Corrections (DOC) to help build pathways from incarceration to higher education and employment.