Getting Started with Concourse

Congratulations on your decision to bring Concourse to your institution! The Syllabus Geeks are excited to assist you in this process to ensure a smooth and successful deployment of Concourse to your faculty, staff, and students.

As with the implementation of any new system or policy on your campus, the first step should be to consider overarching issues surrounding goals, design, people, timing, impact, and anticipated challenges. The following questions should prompt discussion and provide guidance for all institutions implementing Concourse. 

 New Client Intake Questions

Background

• How do you currently manage syllabi?
• What policies are in place related to syllabi?
• What tools do you use to support syllabus management?
• What are your goals for Concourse?

 Content

• Where are the following maintained at your school?
  • Institutional Policies
  • Course Policies
  • Course Descriptions
  • Course Outcomes
  • Program Outcomes
• How are syllabi reviewed for content, compliance, and completeness?

 Item Permissions

• Who should be able to search for and view syllabi at your institution?
• Who should be able to edit master templates?
• How much of a syllabus would you like to make available for editing by instructors?
• How much of a syllabus would you like to make available for viewing by the public?

 Templates

• How pervasive are syllabus templates at your institution?
• How consistent do you feel syllabi are with established templates?
• When an instructor begins editing a syllabus, which content should be pre-populated?

 Integration and Data

• Which student information system (SIS) do you use?
• Which learning management system (LMS) do you use?
• How are courses created in the LMS each term?
• Do you merge/cross-list sections in the LMS?
• How do you expect users to access Concourse?
• Which authentication protocols do you support?

 Deployment

• When do you first want to make Concourse available for your users?
• Who will be responsible for managing Concourse post-implementation?
• How will you validate that Concourse is functioning the way you expect based on your implementation decisions?
• How do you plan to provide training for Concourse?
• How do you plan to provide support for Concourse?
• How would you rank these common implementation challenges?
  • Faculty resistance
  • Team availability/consistency
  • Competing deadlines/priorities
  • Communication issues
  • Access to IT resources
  • Speed of decision making
  • Content/data quality
  • Technical complexity

Examples

In addition to the Client Intake Form PDFs outlining how four very different institutions began the Concourse implementation process on their campus using this form. Each institution encountered similar and different challenges during their implementations, but all ultimately have been successful. Profiles of the institutions are described first along with examples of their answers to the questions above. The Syllabus Geeks recommend that you begin by identifying which implementation best represents your demographic and what your institution wishes to accomplish with Concourse, and use the information contained in these as a model for your institution.

• Institution A: A small college with inefficient procedures for the collection and review of course information, in need of updating their documentation, standardization, and archival of their syllabi for accreditation compliance.
• Institution B: An institution with a substantial online delivery system in need of a way to house all syllabi for online courses in a central, easily-accessible location.
• Institution C: A large community college with several campus locations charged with overhauling their syllabus management procedures to replace an electronic repository to be in compliance with recent state mandates regarding information availability on the web.
• Institution D: An institution currently using a commercial online syllabus system, with procedures in place to collect and review syllabi but interested in extensively managing templates at various levels of the organization.