This semester, the academic catalog as it appears to prospective and returning students received a big update.
Registrar Specialist Jenn Zoll said the registrar’s office is now using CourseLeaf software products CIM (pronounced like “Kim” and standing for “curriculum implementation management”) and CAT (short for “catalog”) in connection with other offices and departments across campus to build the catalog. She described this as a huge change from how the catalog was previously managed.
Zoll said the catalog process was done on paper in previous years. The catalog would be approved by the KSC Senate, sent over to the registrar’s office as paper documents and then scanned and uploaded to a SharePoint site for public viewing.
“When people are doing things on paper, there’s not always accuracy in what’s portrayed, so if you’re adding credit totals for something, the totals wouldn’t always match or there were little things that our office by the end of the process would get access to those documents that we would then have to build and they didn’t make sense,” Zoll said.
CourseLeaf has been integrated across the entire University System of New Hampshire (USNH). Zoll specified that although CAT is the front-facing catalog page, it is not a tool for course registration. The registration process as it takes place in the MyUSNH student information system, powered by Colleague, involves entirely different course sections which are built by Zoll to reflect the information in CAT.
Interim Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Kirsti Sandy said all changes to the catalog must be voted on and approved by the KSC Senate, with the exception of small changes to correct basic spelling or grammar.
“Anything more substantive than that – if you change a line from a course description, you change a course title, even a couple of words from a course title, if it wasn’t an error, anything that might change how a course is understood or delivered or described or learning outcomes has to go through this whole process,” Sandy said.
Director of Online Strategies Chad Cassin said there are many areas of Keene State’s online presence which are managed by offices outside the marketing department and hosted through various products external to the core keene.edu site’s ProcessWire content management system.
Cassin added the marketing department is looking at a potential redesign of the keene.edu site that would involve switching to a new content management system, Drupal. There is also the future the university system continues to look toward with the Workday shared services platform that will integrate system-wide finance, human resources and technology support.
Zoll said although much is up in the air, she does not expect a redesign would impact the operation of the catalog site.
“I don’t think it would impact the catalog because again, it’s calling on a URL, so it basically is just pulling you to that URL when you want to see the catalog,” Zoll said. “[University of New Hampshire] and [Plymouth State University] also use CourseLeaf.”
Zoll added that the other USNH schools are less used to the manual work of creating courses for registration than Keene State is.
“We have the benefit of having Colleague which is an older system and so we have to manually go in and do that work. So to us, if we have to continue doing that with Workday, there won’t be much of a difference.”
Charlotte King can be contacted at
cking@kscequinox.com
