Course Catalog
Description
The Course Catalog Dashboard is a comprehensive tool designed to provide visibility into the University's course inventory, combined with each course’s most recently scheduled class offerings. This dashboard serves as a central resource in the University's curriculum maintenance ecosystem, supporting various stakeholders including department staff, faculty, academic councils/committees, and other roles involved in academic planning and curriculum maintenance.
The dashboard consists of three primary views:
Catalog Overview: A complete listing of all courses in the University catalog with filtering capabilities to view only courses with upcoming changes. This enables efficient catalog management and curriculum planning.
Catalog Change Review: A specialized view displaying courses with pending changes, offering side-by-side comparison between current and future course details. This simplifies the review process and ensures accuracy in course updates.
Retired Courses: A reference repository of discontinued courses, maintained for historical documentation, student inquiries, accreditation reporting, and catalog management purposes. The view preserves institutional knowledge and supports compliance requirements.
Key Business Questions
The dashboard was developed to address critical business questions such as:
How can Academic Organizations track the implementation status of course changes?
What courses have pending changes and how do those changes impact student enrollment?
How can administrators verify that course details are accurately reflected in the student information system?
How can historical course information be accessed for student transcript inquiries?
How can Academic Organizations ensure compliance with the University's academic regulations?
How can staff efficiently review course details for cross-listed courses?
How can Academic Organizations find courses that complete general education requirements across the University's offerings?
What data is available to support accreditation and institutional reporting needs?
How can the dashboard enhance decision making for academic planning and resource allocation?
Customize for Your Needs
All Tableau users have access to the web editing tool ("web edit") that can be used to customize the dashboard or to create a new dashboard from its underlying data source. This powerful feature enables curriculum managers to develop tailored solutions for specific needs beyond the standard dashboard and tap into data fields that are not explicitly shown in the enterprise dashboard.
Other creative applications might include developing specialized reports for accreditation reviews or departmental curriculum planning tools. The web edit functionality essentially transforms the dashboard from a generalized Catalog resource into a dynamic platform that can evolve to meet emerging curriculum management needs.
If you have questions about customize the dashboard or creating a new dashboard from its underlying Course Catalog data source, reach out to the Analytics Team. We’re here to help!
Course Structure & Organization
The University’s defined course hierarchy and structure are reflected throughout the dashboard's organization and filtering capabilities.
The University maintains a hierarchical structure for organizing courses:
Academic Groups represent campuses, schools, offices, and special "placeholder" courses
Academic Organizations represent departments or programs
Subjects describe the area of study within an organization
Catalog Numbers identify specific courses within a subject
The course structure tracked in the dashboard consists of descriptive and enrollment details.
Descriptive details include various fields like subject, catalog number, title, description, course attributes, and more. These fields often aid students in planning their academic journey.
Enrollment details have a direct impact on a student's term and final exam schedule, tuition bill, ability to enroll, and academic progress. They include units/credits, repeat-for-credit, grading basis, enrollment prerequisites, and more.
Data Filtering Notes
Academic Groups such as ACRS, Cooperative Education, and External Credit have been filtered out of the data source layer because these courses exist within PeopleSoft without an existing University course offering. For example, the ACRS group contains courses that were created to build a transcript that ended before the implementation of PeopleSoft.
Essentially, courses within the excluded Academic Groups are "placeholders" for credits earned elsewhere or during a different point in the University's history.
As University catalog maintenance evolved, some vestiges of placeholder courses cannot be filtered out using the Academic Group but can be excluded by using Course Offering number. For this reason, we've used an additional Course Offerings filter to exclude placeholder courses that are "Unknown," "Outlier," and "ACRS and PCHE." The included Course Offering categories are a smaller, more granular way of defining groups of course and will be a useful for homing in your search needs.
Basic Usage
As with all enterprise dashboards, we encourage you to pre-filter the dashboard for your curriculum review needs and save the filtered dashboard as a “custom view.” This will save time when you return for the same details each month, term, or even more frequently. Detailed help for creating custom views is available here.
Because the dashboard pulls from PeopleSoft's curriculum maintenance and term scheduling data, it is important to understand when and how changes within the student information system and University’s Course Catalog are enacted . Users of the Course Catalog Dashboard benefit from familiarity with the broader course creation and update workflow at the University. Please review the Course Creation/Update Workflow overview and consult with your School or department's curriculum manager and the Office of the Registrar for workflow process specifics.
Catalog Overview
The Catalog Overview provides a comprehensive view of the essential descriptive and enrollment details for each active course within the standard University offerings (see Data Filtering Notes for exclusions). The dashboard initially appears blank. For courses to appear, the user must select an Academic Group and the resulting course list can be narrowed by using various filters.
Users may filter between viewing all courses within an academic group and seeing only those with pending changes, or choosing to view the group’s entire inventory. As you change filters, the active class count and resulting course list will change.
Click on a course to review its details. When “Current” is highlighted, the course’s current details appear with the last scheduled class section with the current course structure. The course details in the dashboard match the information found in the annual University Catalog publication and PeopleSoft’s CX Course Catalog information. You will see the last offered class schedule for with the current course structure displayed.
When “Future” is highlighted, the details reflect the upcoming state of the course and any sections scheduled with the new course structure. The details in the dashboard match the information found in PeopleSoft’s CX Class Search upcoming term schedules, assuming a class section has been added to an upcoming schedule. The details will also match the PeopleSoft Classic course catalog screen, assuming you have access to the PS Curriculum Management screens for the Academic Org in question.
If you select a new course, the view defaults to blank. Click on the “Future” button to view the course details. Scheduled class sections will only appear if the course has been added to upcoming term schedules.
When using course attribute filters, the category and sub-category selections are interconnected, so choosing the upper-level category before proceeding to a sub-category is recommended.
Also note, if unselecting an attribute category or sub-category, courses with multiple attributes that include the unselected category or sub-category will still appear in the list.
Catalog Change Review
The Catalog Change Review tab focuses specifically on courses within the standard University offerings that have future-dated modifications. Begin navigating the Catalog Change Review following the same steps as the Catalog Overview; select an Academic Group and expand/collapse the filter menu for more ways to narrow the results list.
At the top of the dashboard is a check list for each updated detail of a course or new course offered within the chosen Academic Group. When you select a course, a side-by-side comparison will appear with current course details displayed on the left and future implementation details shown on the right.
The comparison encompasses changes across all course elements, from descriptive details such as title, description, and attributes to enrollment details including units, grading basis, enrollment requirements, and components. This comparative view is particularly valuable for ensuring that approved changes are correctly implemented in the system and the date on which the changes will be viewable to staff, faculty, and students who utilize the University's Catalog or Class Search tools.
As well, staff and faculty can monitor the creation or change to a course which may trigger further steps on the path to updating curricular and advising tools such as Academic Advisement Reports.
Changes between versions are visually highlighted in bold blue font within the description box, allowing users to quickly identify modifications.
Attribute changes do not change font styles, so look for adjustments to the attribute tables shown side-by-side.
Retired Courses
The Retired Courses view is a reference resource for inactivated courses. To get started with this dashboard, select an Academic Organization from the filter pane on the left side of the screen. Then select a course from the listings to display its most recent descriptive and enrollment details. These details provide a comprehensive overview of the course at the time it was retired.
There are two triggers for inactivating a course:
A request submitted, approved, and processed through the Registrar's Catalog Update workflow, or
A course has not been added to a term schedule within the last five years.
Courses inactivated by either trigger (requesting or disuse) will appear within this list. Course inactivated automatically may be reactivated by request through the established Course Catalog Update workflow as long as all details of the course remain the same. Meanwhile, those inactivated by request from the Academic Organization may not be reactivated. A new course must be created in their stead and the subject + catalog number combination may not be reused for a minimum of 10 years.
All retired courses with an effective date of June 1 were automatically inactivated due to disuse.
This repository of retired courses serves multiple purposes within the University:
Staff can access information when responding to student transcript inquiries about courses taken in previous years
The data supports the preparation of accreditation reports that require documentation of past curriculum offerings
Academic Organizations can verify course retirement status when planning curriculum revisions
The archive helps prevent duplication when developing new course offerings by providing visibility into previously offered content
Faculty and staff can identify classes inactivated because of disuse (which can be reactivated) versus those that were requested for inactivation (requiring creation of a new course)