Curriculum Management Project team seeks campus feedback

The Curriculum Management Project aims to update and enhance systems to save time and provide students, faculty, and staff the information they need

A great deal of work goes into managing curriculum at UC Santa Cruz. Courses and program statements must be developed and go through an approval process. Catalogs must be composed and published. Classes must be scheduled. Navigation of these cumbersome processes always requires extensive effort.

The Curriculum Management Project at UC Santa Cruz aims to streamline and improve the systems used to manage campus curriculum and create course catalogs.

This project affects nearly everyone on campus involved in academics: students, faculty, and academic staff. The project team wants to reach out to as many people as possible in the academic community to ensure what the team builds meets campus needs.

To aid in this, the team has created three surveys: one for undergraduate students, one for graduate students, and one for faculty/staff.

The project team encourages everyone in the academic community to visit the project website, fill out the survey, and sign up to receive regular updates on the project.

Why the project is needed

The systems used to manage curriculum and create catalogs are outdated. There is a lot of manual work that can be automated, and the systems involved do not talk well to each other, requiring extra effort to ensure consistency.

The Curriculum Management Project aims to:

  • Improve student experience with timely and accurate class, lab, and section scheduling
  • Improve student experience with an interactive and searchable catalog
  • Eliminate duplicate processes and multiple points of data entry
  • Eliminate multiple handoffs and manual processing
  • Improve accuracy
  • Improve student success through increased time for direct advising
  • Free up faculty and staff time to support student retention and time-to-degree initiatives

The project, overseen by the Office of the Registrar in the Division of Undergraduate Education, in collaboration with Information Technology Services, the Academic Senate, and a multitude of offices and individuals across campus, began on Oct. 17 and will require two to three years to complete.