Streamline The Curriculum Management Process

Curriculum management requires complex business processes that present many challenges, especially if your institution uses paper-based manual processes. 

In talking with hundreds of provosts, registrars, curriculum managers, and other administrators responsible for curriculum at higher education institutions, we’ve honed in on four critical curriculum management business process challenges. 

Let’s dive into those four challenges and how a software solution can help you address them.    

Curriculum Committee Meetings

Reviewing, collaborating, and finalizing approvals are required steps to manage curriculum and holding meetings is a common tactic to move through these steps. However, when you consider all the meetings needed to manage the many programs and courses across an institution, time spent in meetings can add up to hundreds of hours. 

By leveraging a software solution, you can use features such as robust reporting, collaborative agendas, in-proposal commenting, and approval workflows tailored to each department’s approval processes. Using these features facilitates asynchronous edits and reduces the need to meet as often.

Manual Data Entry

As curriculum is updated, new information needs to be added regularly to multiple systems, including the student information system and academic catalog. However, when admins manually enter data into those systems, two problems occur: manual entry takes hours of work that admins could use more efficiently, and it presents more opportunities for error within the data.

 A curriculum management solution can remove the need to manually re-enter data into other systems through integrations. Additionally, with regular synching, your data is always up-to-date. 

Maintaining Versions and Records

Many institutions struggle to ensure curriculum managers and faculty are reviewing the most current version of a proposal as it moves through approvals. Additionally, providing access to comments on proposals or visibility into the revisions requires massive amounts of work. Even then, it is still difficult to provide those records in an organized way for reporting.

A digital solution maintains the most current version of each proposal and provides time-stamped edits, comments, and approvals, keeping everyone on the same page and making reporting a breeze.

Curriculum Relationship Management 

As you know, your curriculum forms a complex web of connections. When any single element, such as learning outcomes, of a course or program is changed, the effects on other courses and programs can be far-reaching, forming hidden dependencies. Unfortunately, hidden dependencies are hard to spot and nearly impossible to eradicate. 

A digital curriculum management system offers structured data capabilities. It can maintain the relationship between the elements of your curriculum and provide alerts when proposal changes impact other courses and programs, giving you the heads up you need to act and eliminate a hidden dependency.