At the President’s Annual Address to the Faculty in September, President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C. spoke of the University’s initiatives to enhance education, inquiry, and governance. He explained the extensive revision of the Core Curriculum “will allow students to make significant decisions about their course of study” and that the revision “makes significant changes to the oversight of undergraduate academic advising.”
Due to this initiative, University Registrar Chuck Hurley tasked the Office of the Registrar to create and launch a state-of-the-art online course form.
“The new Core Curriculum provided a wonderful opportunity for the Office of the Registrar to think anew about course creation,” says Hurley. “Our team was able to leverage the latest technology and collaborate with the academic community on campus to construct new tools for course data management.”Due to this initiative, University Registrar Chuck Hurley tasked the Office of the Registrar to create and launch a state-of-the-art online New Course Form.
The new tool includes embedded workflow functionality for the University's new undergraduate Core Curriculum review process.
This new application and workflow replaces the previous arrangement that used the former New Course Form and a separate Google Form submission for Core Curriculum Review.
Assistant Registrar Paul Ullrich explains, “This project gave us an opportunity to replace the existing but aging application for course submission with a more modern, sleeker and more powerful application for course management. We also were able to revise some processes to be more efficient in our use of time, and clearer in purpose.”
Michael Hildreth, associate dean of the College of Science and chair of the University Core Curriculum Committee is enthusiastic about the new developments.
“The new tools the Registrar’s Office has developed provide the Core Curriculum subcommittees with a simple way to access all of the course submission information to share it,” says Hildreth. “They can see immediately the status of all of the courses under review.”
He adds that the Registrar’s office offered support throughout the implementation of the new Core Curriculum. “Frankly, we couldn’t have done this without their help.”
The new undergraduate Core Curriculum became effective for incoming first-year students matriculating in the 2018-19 academic year. To view student progress toward the new "Ways of Knowing" standards, the GPS degree audit software was revised to display a new Core Curriculum University Requirements block for all undergraduate students having a Catalog Year of Summer 2018 or later.
Academic Course Management (ACM) is used to add new courses to the Course Catalog and to submit courses for University Core Curriculum review.
How the ACM process works:
- Under the Forms heading within the ACM Tool, academic departments can choose either (1) New Course or (2) New University Requirement.
- Departments will submit a New Course Form that is routed to the department's dean for review. If a course is submitted for consideration as a University Core requirement, then the department can select the relevant “Way(s) of Knowing” and attach the required supplementary materials. This generates the creation of a separately routed Core Curriculum eForm.
- If the course was submitted for University Core requirement review, and the dean approved the new course, then the relevant members of the Core Curriculum subcommittee submit their review decision for the applicable “Ways of Knowing”. The Core Curriculum eForm is then routed to the Registrar for action, where the new course is coded as approved for the University Core requirement. The initiating department will receive a notification that the course has been approved. At this point, the department can begin adding sections of the course to the upcoming term.
The new ACM Tool is available as a "Task" within insideND. Instructions for the New Course form can be found at registrar.nd.edu/faculty/coursescheduling.php and details about the New University Requirement form can be found at registrar.nd.edu/faculty/course_submission.php.