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An Admin's Guide to Curriculum Management

Table of Contents

Overview
Saving this Page as a PDF
Curriculum Management Overview
Logging In
User Management
Roles Management
Departments
Building Templates and Forms 
Cross Listing
Requirements/Requisites
Effective Dating
Workflows
Committees
Agendas
Form Routing

Terms
Health Checks
SIS Integration Overview, Maintenance, and Best Practices
Help & Support

Overview

  • This guide is intended to help Curriculum Management admins get their environment ready for end users. 

  • Every section of this guide includes a high-level “Overview” for the listed feature.

  • The “Learn More” section includes links to more detailed articles and videos.

  • Some sections include additional sub-sections, broken down by topic.


Saving this Page as a PDF

If you wish to save this or any linked article(s) as a printable PDF, simply: 

  1. Right click anywhere on the page (or control+click on a Mac).

  2. Select “print” from the list of options.

  3. Under “Destination”, select “Save as PDF”.

  4. Click “Save”.

  5. Select the folder on your desktop where you’d like to save the file. 

  6. Click “Save”.


Curriculum Management Overview

Overview 

  • Coursedog's Curriculum Management platform helps your institution eliminate manual, error-prone paper and PDF-based approval processes and provides actionable insights to improve student outcomes.

  • Curriculum Management allows users to propose new courses and programs, manage and edit existing courses and programs, create committees to review and approve proposals, define and build out course/program requirements, route proposals through workflows for approval, and configure and maintain degree maps.

Learn More


Logging In

Overview

  • Log into Coursedog at app.coursedog.com with your institutional email address and password.

  • If you haven’t been fully implemented yet and/or are testing configurations, go to staging.coursedog.com (your “Sandbox”). 

  • If your institution is using single-sign-on (SSO), you will be redirected to your institution’s login page. 


Learn More

Visit Logging Into Coursedog to learn more about supported browsers, ways to log in, and logging out.


User Management

PATH: Curriculum Management > Settings > Users


Overview

There are three ways to add users to your Coursedog environment: 

  1. Manually in-app at Curriculum > Settings > Users. 

  2. Via a CSV upload (requires Coursedog support).

  3. Via SSO (requires Coursedog support). 


Learn More


Roles Management

PATH: Curriculum Management > Settings > Roles


Overview

  • Curriculum Management comes loaded with several prebuilt roles. 

  • You can create additional custom roles to suit your institution’s needs.

  • You can assign different permissions to different roles, allowing you to distinguish between different types of users en masse. 


Learn More


Departments

PATH: Curriculum Management > Settings > Departments


Overview

  • You can organize courses, programs, and proposals by department.

  • If you have proposals that are assigned to specific departments, you can use dynamic steps within Approval Workflows to automatically generate the workflow step based on that department. 

Learn More

Our Configuring Departments article walks you through adding and setting up departments.


Building Templates and Forms

Overview | Course Template | Program Template | Curriculum Forms | Document Types / Campus

Overview

  • The Course and Program Templates and all related forms are made up of cards, and each card consists of different fields that admins drag from the Question Bank and drop onto the template. 

  • Once a field is on a template, you can click into it to edit its settings (including visibility and editability). 

  • You can move fields at any time by dragging them. 


Course Template

PATH: Curriculum Management > Settings > Course Template


Overview

  • The Course Template defines the basic set of information that constitutes a course. 

  • The fields you add to the Course Template will determine what end users can input when creating a course. 

Learn More


Program Template

PATH: Curriculum Management > Settings > Program Template


Overview

  • Whereas the Course Template includes the fields you need to define a Course, the Program Template indicates which fields you need to define a Program.

  • The fields you add to the Program Template will determine what end users can input when creating a program. 

Learn More


Curriculum Forms

PATH: Curriculum Management > Forms


Overview

  • Forms allow administrators to define what information must be collected in a valid proposal.

  • The most common proposals include New Course Forms, Edit Course Forms, and Edit Program forms.

  • Forms consist of questions from the corresponding template (i.e. the Course Template for a course form) and any additional fields/questions you add.

  • The fields you add to a form will determine what end users can input when submitting one.

Learn More

  • For step-by-step guidance through form creation, go to Curriculum Management > Forms and click “+Add Form”. A pop-up should appear, asking you if you’d like help creating your form. If the pop-up doesn’t appear, you can access the flow in the In-App Guides widget instead.  

  • Managing Curriculum Forms explains what forms are, how you use them, and how to build them. 


Document Types / Campus

PATH: Curriculum Management > Settings > Document Types

Overview

  • Some institutions also elect to use our “Campus” feature, which allows you to create custom form types for proposals outside of Courses and Programs.

  • In order for end users to be able to fully use the Campus feature, an admin would need to first create Document Types. 

  • Each Document Type has its own template and its own form(s).


Learn More

Reference our Document Types and Using Campus articles for full details.


Cross Listing

PATH: Curriculum Management > Settings > Course Template

Overview

  • Cross-listing a course means that a single course is offered for registration under two or more departments.

  • These courses might be equivalent for degree audit or financial aid purposes or have equivalent data such as credit counts, but differ in subject code and department. 

  • There is a “cross-listed field” setting for each field in the Course Template. This field allows users to indicate if a field is cross listed and should have the same value for all of the courses in the group. 


Learn More

See our Cross Listing article for full details. 


Requirements/Requisites

Overview | Course Sets | Requirement Sets | Learn More

PATH: Curriculum Management > Settings > Course/Program Template.

Overview

  • You can create requirements for individual courses as well as programs using either a simple or free-form builder. 

  • Advanced Settings for requirements can be configured by admins on the Course and Program Templates.

  • The settings you define will impact what end users see when building requirements for courses or programs. 

  • You and/or your end users can create Course Sets and Requirement Sets to simplify requirement creation. 

Course Sets

PATH: Curriculum Management > Course Sets


  • A “course set” is essentially a collection of courses that can be selected as a data type when building course or program requirements or even Requirement Sets. 

  • Course sets can be “static” or “dynamic”. In dynamic course sets, the list of courses is determined by course attributes. 


Requirement Sets

PATH: Curriculum Management > Requirement Sets


  • Requirement Sets can be used to create requirements that are shared between programs. 

  • Whereas Course Sets are simply a list of courses, a requirement set can be built using complex logic, which simplifies creating requirements for individual programs. 

  • You can use Course Sets to build Requirement Sets. 


Learn More


Effective Dating

Overview

  • Effective Dating allows you to create different revisions and versions of courses, programs, and document types, so you can manage more than one variation of the same object. This is useful if, for example, you are planning for a future term and need to make changes to a course/program/document but don’t want those changes to apply to the current term. 

  • Each new effective date or term range creates a revision, so long as a revision doesn’t not already exist for each range. 

  • When a course/program/document type is modified but the dates or terms are not, a new version is created. 

  • A single revision can have multiple versions, but not the other way around. 

  • You can access revisions and versions in the upper right-hand corner of the screen when viewing the course or program. 

  • Not all SISs support effective dating, but there are workarounds you can employ to make some use of versioning. 

Learn More


Workflows

Overview | Workflow Notifications | Learn More

PATH: Curriculum > Workflows

Overview

  • When a user submits a proposal, it goes through an approval workflow. This ensures the proposal goes to the right people for review and approval. 

  • You can create multiple workflows and associate them with different forms.

  • Workflow participants can be notified via email whenever a proposal is routed to them; admins can customize those notifications. 

Workflow Notifications

  • Default Workflow Notifications can be found and edited at Curriculum > Settings > Workflow Notifications. Every workflow will be automatically populated with these notifications. 

  • If you don’t want to use the default Workflow Notification for a particular workflow, you can edit it within the workflow at Curriculum > Workflows > (Select Workflow) > Edit Workflow.

  • Some emails can be configured at the step level (meaning they are workflow-specific and step-specific); those can be edited at Curriculum > Workflows > (Select Workflow) > (Select Step) > Edit Email Templates. 

Learn More


Committees

PATH: Curriculum Management > Settings > Committees 


Overview

  • You can create, view, and delete committees in Curriculum Management as well as see which agendas are associated with the committee. 

  • Before you create a committee, ensure users have been configured.

Learn More

Agendas

Overview

  • You can create agendas in two places: Curriculum Management > Settings > Committees and  Curriculum Management > Agendas. 

  • In order to properly create an agenda, you will want to first ensure that users and committees are configured in your system and there are proposals to add to the agenda. 

Learn More

Our Creating & Managing Agendas article provides step-by-step instructions on creating, viewing, editing, and deleting agendas.  


Form Routing

PATH: Curriculum Management > Settings > Form Routing


Overview

  • Form routing is designed to help ensure end users select the correct form when submitting a proposal. 

  • By using form routing, admins can define a list of questions with different outcomes to dynamically direct end users to the proper form. 

Learn More

Our Form Routing article walks you through how form routing works.


Terms

PATH: Curriculum Management > Settings > Terms

Overview

  • Use this page to define the term that is currently active on campus (“Current Active Term”), the term you’re currently scheduling for (“Current Scheduling Term”) and Semester Names.

  • Terms work across our platform, so terms in Curriculum Management align with Academic Scheduling or Catalog.

  • To update listed terms, click the values in the gray bar below, and a dropdown menu will appear.

  • If your term isn't listed, make sure Coursedog is connected to your SIS and configured correctly. 

  • Click “Add Term” to create a new term. 

  • Click “Show historical terms” to view terms that have been marked as historical. If a term is "historical", then it will NOT show up in drop-down options throughout the app.

Learn More

  • Check out Defining Terms & Dates for details.

  • This video shows you how to change the Current Scheduling term, which is what will display for all users by default when they first log in unless they’ve defined a different Default Term. 

  • See Setting Your Default Term to see how you and end users can change the term that is displayed by default. 

Health Checks

PATH: Curriculum Management > Settings > Health Checks

Overview

  • This looks at workflows to make sure they have participants and all steps are connected.

  • You should review this regularly (e.g. monthly) and resolve any warnings. 

Learn More

Our Admin Dashboard Overview article talks about System Health Checks across our platform. 


SIS Integration Overview, Maintenance, and Best Practices

Overview

  • If your institution’s Student Information System (SIS) has a planned outage, you should disable your Coursedog integration prior to the start of maintenance to avoid any errors. 

  • We recommend that you keep your staging environment up to date. 

    • Use the end or start of a new term as a point in your process to ensure data, settings, etc. in your staging environment is up to date and not stale.

    • Out-of-date staging environments can lead to false confidence when testing new features, new integration enhancements/scripts, etc. If your business practices, processes, etc. have changed, the tests run in stage will not be reflective of the environment rolled out in production.


Learn More


Help & Support

Overview

  • You can search our Knowledge Base, submit a support ticket, and check the status of an existing ticket at coursedog.freshdesk.com

  • If you’re in-app and have a question, you don’t need to open a new browser tab – you can also submit a support ticket and search for articles from within our app via the “Resources” widget in the upper right-hand corner of your screen. 

  • There are tooltips throughout Curriculum Management. If you see an “i” icon, hover over it for a tooltip that explains related functionality and often links to a help article. 

Learn More

The Customer Support section of our knowledge base includes several articles that speak to in-app help, how our help center works, submitting and monitoring tickets, how product releases work, and more. 

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