In late 2024, the American Association of Community Colleges and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities teamed with consulting company Sova and Zachary Pardos from the University of California, Berkeley to launch the AI Transfer and Articulation Infrastructure Network (ATAIN). The initiative aims to streamline the transfer process for community college students through the use of artificial intelligence. The first cohort of colleges to participate in ATAIN was recently selected.
This article comes from the current issue of the Community College Journal, published bimonthly by the American Association of Community Colleges.
Zachary Pardos, an associate professor of education and the director of the Computational Approaches to Human Learning (CAHL) research lab at UC Berkeley, answered CC Journal’s questions about ATAIN.
Can you give us the elevator pitch for ATAIN?
Imagine a system of higher ed where students’ hard-earned college credit goes with them — no matter where their educational journey takes them — and where transfer pathways and course recommendations are tailored to the students’ personal goals. That’s exactly what we’re building with ATAIN (the AI Transfer and Articulation Infrastructure Network).
We’re using a software platform called CourseWise to harness artificial intelligence so transfer can be easier, faster, and fairer for students everywhere, whether they want to transfer locally or nationally. Critically, we are also designing CourseWise to provide direct benefits to institutions in the form of integrated systems and data, streamlined workload, and reduced costs. And we’re doing so in an open way, helping pioneer open standards and open data.
Related article: Using AI to streamline college transfers
What prompted you to launch this network? Which transfer obstacles do you hope ATAIN will address?
Too many transfer students lose credits, time and money. Even worse, learners from lower-income backgrounds, adult learners, and other often overlooked communities face the greatest obstacles. We believe technology, particularly AI, can assist us in overcoming those challenges. Through ATAIN, we’re streamlining the entire transfer experience so that credits can move more seamlessly with the student. This way, institutions can better support learners, and students won’t have to jump through hoops just to see their hard-earned credits applied to their degree paths.
How can AI actually make transfer smoother for both students and faculty?
First, CourseWise looks at current course equivalencies between participating schools and uses AI to find new or expanded matches so more classes count toward degree completion. That means less credit loss for students and less manual review for staff and faculty.
Second, we’re rolling out a feature that lets students see personalized pathways to completion. Imagine uploading your transcript, or having your data imported, and instantly seeing multiple “best-fit” routes to a credential, whether you want to finish at a local community college or transfer across the country. AI can do that matching at scale, freeing faculty and staff to focus on mentoring and guidance rather than paperwork.
Ultimately, we hope that ATAIN can become a one-stop hub for transfer students, while also reducing workload for institutions.
How will you measure whether ATAIN is successful?
We’ve formed a powerhouse collaboration: UC Berkeley’s CAHL lab (which I direct), Equivalence Systems (a spin-off from the CAHL lab), the American Association of Community Colleges, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities and Sova.
We’ll gather feedback on CourseWise by directly engaging campuses through learning communities, on-the-ground technical assistance, and iterative user experience testing.
On the data side, we’re developing a dashboard that monitors how often courses count toward degree requirements, how quickly credits transfer, and how student outcomes improve. Over the long term, we’ll track graduation rates, time to degree, and who gains from faster credit acceptance.
ATAIN is still in the early stages. Do you see it growing beyond the first cohort?
Absolutely. We’re ready to announce our first group of institutions and will continue expanding as additional funding and partners join. Our vision extends well beyond a software tool: We aim for a truly national network that serves institutions and systems within states and reduces cost by not duplicating the effort to build this functionality state by state. We want to reduce credit loss across the board, integrate seamlessly with the systems institutions already use, and help set open standards so everyone benefits, especially learners who’ve traditionally faced the most challenging road.
Our hope is that this becomes a game-changer, fundamentally altering how we handle credit transfer in higher education so that, eventually, no student has to wonder, “Will my credits count?” Instead, the path forward will be clear and impartial for all.
