[Oasfaa] Good News on OFAX!!

[Mowdy, Mary]

Greetings!  

OSRHE has completed the contract process with the Oregon Student
Assistance Commission for Oklahoma financial aid offices to use the
Oregon Financial Aid Exchange (OFAX) system.  

You will recall that OFAX is a simple system designed to facilitate the
timely exchange of required information between two institutions when
they have a financial aid consortium agreement in place with each other
to award financial aid to a student enrolled at both institutions
simultaneously.  Oklahoma will have its own version of OFAX - there will
be no Oregon schools' data in the Oklahoma pipeline.  

The system is designed so that institutions exchange information on only
their "shared" students.  Institutions sharing information agree with
each other on the frequency of sending updated information on their
shared students.  For example, TCC and OSU might decide that they want
to deposit and/or retrieve information from the OFAX data base on their
"shared" students once a day during the peak of the aid packaging
season.  But another pair of institutions might decide on a different
frequency to exchange data on their shared students.  

There will be no charge to Oklahoma institutions to use the OFAX system.
This system is available to private, public, career and career-tech
schools.  All an institution needs to do to participate is to sign an
OFAX agreement with the Oregon Student Aid Commission,  to get set up
from in IT perspective (which should be simple), and to have a "partner"
school, i.e. another school that the institution is sharing dually
enrolled students with.  

Next steps are:

1) Determine which institutions wish to participate.  Please reply to
this email to let me know if your institution is interested in
participating and who your "partner" school(s) are.   Institutions will
sign an OFAX Agreement with the Oregon Student Assistance Commission
(See sample attached below.)  

2) OSRHE will facilitate discussion among all participating institutions
to determine common field definitions.  OSAC/OFAX staff help us do this.
All institutions, regardless of who they are exchanging information
with, will need to agree on common field definitions.  

3) Engage the Oregon Student Aid Commission to provide training if
desired to the participating Oklahoma institutions.


So - let me know by replying to this email if your institution wants to
participate. You can also sign up later, as your needs change or
develop.  Also let me know if you would like for me to forward to you
the power point presentation that we made at the fall 2006 OASFAA
conference.  And of course, let me know if you have questions!  
 
Mary


Mary Mowdy, Executive Director
Oklahoma Guaranteed Student Loan Program
A division of the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education
P. O. Box 3000
Oklahoma City, OK 73101-3000
405-234-4310  fax: 405-234-4565
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