Progress on Prior Learning Work in WA

More than 130 participants from 50 Washington State institutions of higher education (both public and private) participated in the second annual Prior Learning Assessment workshop, held on November 2, 2012. Participating institutions demonstrated substantial progress and improvements in PLA awareness and implementation of practices.

These improvements are aimed at helping the state meet the legislative mandate to increase the number of students receiving PLA credit that applies toward degrees and certificates, achieve its degree completion goals, reduce the need for required courses which might be waived for students who earn prior learning credits, give credit where credit is due for returning military veterans and other students with prior learning knowledge and skills, and reduce time and cost to complete certificates and degrees.

A statewide PLA work group has been meeting since June of 2010. Since then, colleges have identified a single point of contact on each campus (completed in fall of 2011), adopted reciprocity agreements to ensure the portability of prior learning credits (completed in spring of 2012), adopted a common coding system to accurately track prior learning credit activity (completed in summer of 2012), and published prior learning assessment information in college class schedules and on college websites (completed in fall of 2012).

In addition, the statewide prior learning workgroup has provided online prior learning assessment resources (ongoing since 2010), created a prior learning handbook for faculty and staff (distributed in fall of 2012), and held two statewide Prior Learning Assessment (PLA) workshops for college and university teams (fall of 2011 and 2012).