ARCHIVED: Completed project: Course Descriptions

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Primary UITS contact: Sandy Thompson

Completed: March 14, 2011

Description: This project allows system-wide delivery of bulletin and class descriptions through the Student Information System.

Outcome: The goal of this project was to enable viewing of bulletin and class descriptions by students as they browse course catalog and schedule of classes pages for academic planning and registration purposes.

Milestones and status:

Three types of descriptions were relevant for this project:

  • Catalog descriptions: These were not part of this project. They are stored in the Course Catalog table and represent the university view of the course. They are collected via CARMin (and its approval process in Workflow). This is in production.
  • Bulletin descriptions: These are stored in an IU table at the Course Catalog Course Offering table level. They represent the institution or school/department view of the course.
    • Collection: The WCMS Office of Creative Services drops a file on a server for pickup by a job on the SIS batch schedule. This process has been in production since August, 2010, for BL, CO, IUPUI, NW, and approximately 11,500 descriptions have been captured to date. KO and SE are working on getting data to the Office of Creative Services.
    • Student search: This went into production in December 2010; the search is delivered through Planner and Browse Course Catalog functionality in the SIS.
  • Class descriptions: These are stored in an IU table. They represent the term/instructor view of the course.
    • Collection: This application went into production in December 2010. For faculty, access is via the Curriculum Management content area in OneStart (available to instructors). The ability for faculty to designate a delegate to enter the class description went into production in early January, 2011. The ability for administrative staff and "superusers" to enter the class description when into production in February, 2011.
    • Student Search: This went into production in December 2010; the search is delivered via navigation from Search for Classes in Self Service.
    • It is likely that it will be some period of time before we actually start getting this data from instructors. The class description search that students will use will first look for class descriptions that meet the criteria for classes for an instit/career/term. If a class description is not found for a section, the search will look to see if there is a bulletin description for that section that meets the search criteria.

Next steps: System-wide release to faculty, their delegates, and administrative staff will be handled by the functional staff, but the final technical pieces were put in place as of February 26, 2011.

Primary client: Students are the primary clients that benefit from this project.

Client impact: Students are impacted in terms of being able to make better decisions regarding course selections during planning stages and registration.

Project team: The development team was made up of developers from the SIS technical team. The system-wide Student Enrollment Services office has served the functional analyst role to date.

Governance: The Enterprise Student Systems Executive Committee (ESSEC) was the governing body to determine priority of requests. Functional representation was directed by Student Enrollment Services. The SIS systems development manager was responsible for technical implementation.

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Last modified on 2018-01-18 16:25:25.