Synopsis
Your institution’s syllabi likely contain a variety of data that originate or are stored in different platforms. Concourse allows your institution to quickly and easily consolidate important course data from multiple sources in your syllabi. Determining where this data will be sourced and how it arrives in your syllabi is an important decision that can impact data consistency, the user experience, and long-term reporting needs.
In unstructured Concourse systems, syllabus templates and items are not available and a single file is uploaded to each course to serve as the syllabus. Institutions that use an unstructured Concourse system, therefore, might consider a shared drive or offline repository of syllabus files to be a source of truth for historical courses. These files can be uploaded en masse to historical courses, but future syllabi should be uploaded as files specific to the course at the time it is offered. If you would like to learn more about uploading historical PDFs to unstructured Concourse systems, email
support@campusconcourse.com to begin the discussion.
In structured Concourse systems, each syllabus item has its own source of truth. Concourse gives you even more control over how syllabus items are populated by allowing you to choose whether the source of truth is used to populate the item on templates–used for consistent items, such as course descriptions–or if the source of truth is used to populate items on live/section syllabi–used for items that change regularly, such as instructor information and course meeting times. It’s also possible to draw from different sources to populate different syllabus items. For example, your institution’s source of truth for course descriptions may be your catalog tool, while data for course meeting times and instructor information may originate from the SIS, and other syllabus items may be manually populated by template editors or end users. There’s no one way to populate syllabi. Continue reading to learn more about the available options.
Key Terms
- Course: the artifact in Concourse that contains the syllabus.
- Syllabus: The main resource in a course in Concourse; the syllabus can be either structured or unstructured and contains course content, language, and policies.
- Template: a course whose syllabus contains standard item content that will be cloned (i.e., copied) into non-template (i.e., live/section) syllabi; instructors and students are typically not registered to templates.
- Non-template: a course in Concourse that matches a unique section offering at your institution; the non-template syllabus usually contains information cloned from a template. Instructors and students are typically registered to non-templates.
- Item: a category of related content in a syllabus; there are twelve default items in a Concourse syllabus, including Meeting Times, Contact Information, Description, Objectives, Outcomes, Materials, Deliverables, Evaluation, Course Policies, Institutional Policies, Additional Items, and Schedule.
- Subitem: a lower-level or child item that can be added to a syllabus in multiples once the parent item has been added (e.g., Textbook is a subitem of Materials); subitems cannot be populated or updated with item feeds, but subitems are copied when a user processes a copy feed of an item containing subitems.
- Source of truth: a centralized, authoritative repository or system that holds the most accurate and reliable data for your institution; in structured Concourse systems, we identify the source of truth per item, not for the syllabus as a whole.
- SIS: Student Information System; a software platform used to store data about courses and course offerings at your institution. Some SIS platforms include Banner, Ellucian, and Jenzabar.
- Feed: a data file that is used to migrate information from external systems to Concourse; feeds can be automated or processed manually.
- Syllabus Content (Item) Feeds: feeds used to create and update syllabus items; each syllabus item in your Concourse system has a designated Item Feed that can be used to populate the item.
Important to this Decision
Before making decisions about how your institution uses Concourse, you should consider how stakeholders, systems, timelines, and other factors are impacted. Review the important elements below to be better prepared to make changes to your Concourse configuration or implementation.
Prior to making this decision, you should consult your institution’s Registrar, SIS admin, staff from Academic Affairs, personnel whose work is related to accreditation or compliance, and any other stakeholders whose work is related to syllabus or curriculum development. If you are interested in using feeds to push data from a source of truth to Concourse, you should reach out to IT staff who assist with the development and processing of feeds.
The data source used to populate Concourse syllabi should contain the most complete, consistent, accurate data your institution has available for the item. To figure out which data source is the best choice for an item, you should work with academic stakeholders and system admins to review data available in your other systems and confirm the data’s quality and completeness. If you aren’t sure whether the available data in a given system is complete, consistent, and accurate, you should investigate whether there is a better option for sourcing the data.
This decision is typically made during the implementation phase when templates are being developed, but your institution can change data sources for syllabus items as well as the method of populating items afterward if your institution’s needs change.
Your data sources for syllabus content may include the SIS, a catalog tool, internal documentation, shared drives, or other repositories.
- If you opt to use the SIS or a catalog tool to populate syllabus content, this can be done via feed. Once the information for a given item has been collected from your institutional resources, it is formatted and processed in Concourse as an Item Feed. A Concourse System Admin can process the Item Feed manually, or the Item Feed can be automated.
- If you opt to use a shared repository, website, or other location that cannot easily be queried to generate a feed file, then syllabus content must be entered into syllabi manually.
If your institution opts to generate and process Item Feed files from the SIS or a catalog tool:
- Data is queried from the external tool to generate a .txt file in the appropriate format. Many system admins use SQL to collect the data and generate feed files.
- Feeds can be processed manually by uploading a correctly-formatted .txt file to Concourse; feeds can also be automated with the use of tools like PowerShell.
If your institution opts to have high-level users manually input syllabus content from another data source:
- Provide guidance to users about what items are to be populated, the syllabi where items are to be populated, and what the standards and expectations are.
- Use Concourse’s Instructor Training Templates to find and adapt step-by-step instructions for editing syllabus items in Concourse to share with manual editors.
- Implement a review process to ensure that data entered manually is accurate, error-free, and otherwise meets expectations.
If you decide to change the way that syllabus content is added or updated on existing syllabi, we recommend that you review current content prior to making changes to ensure that historical syllabi are not overwritten.
Choose the method that works best given your institutional data and resources. Some data sources mentioned below might not be used by your institution, or the data available in the data source may not be complete. Reflect on the data you have available or how data can be collected easily in order to figure out the option that makes the most sense for your external systems, available support personnel, and Concourse setup.
Configuration Options
The most important factor in your institution’s decision-making process about data sourcing is the availability and quality of existing data in your other systems. If syllabus content that aligns with a Concourse item is complete, accurate, and consistent in an external tool, then it makes sense to choose that tool as the data source for that item; if the syllabus content or course data available in an external tool is incomplete or not updated, however, using that data source for the syllabus item will probably lead to data gaps or other complications that would require additional oversight and intervention. Options for sourcing data for syllabi include:
- Option A: Source Data from the SIS (Item Feeds)
- Option B: Source Data from the Catalog Tool (Item Feeds)
- Option C: Source Data from Shared Drives and Other Repositories (Manual Input)
Keep in mind that it is possible (and common) to use more than one data source for syllabus content (one source per item). Such an approach might include an institution doing all of the following:
- Using the catalog tool to generate Item Feeds for course descriptions on syllabus templates;
- Directing academic leaders to edit objectives manually on syllabus templates with information from a shared drive; and
- Using the SIS to generate Item Feeds for instructor information and meeting times on live/section syllabi.
If the choices below don’t fit your needs, reach out to Client Services for assistance.
- Approach: Review the data available in your SIS for completeness and accuracy and determine how the available data aligns with syllabus items in Concourse. Determine which syllabus items will be populated using this data, whether information from the SIS will be added to template syllabi or to live/section syllabi, and how often the feeds will be processed. Course information that is consistent regardless of when the course is offered tends to work better on templates and may only be processed once per academic year; examples include the course description, objectives, or materials. Course information that is subject to change regularly, such as the instructor information or meeting times, is more appropriate for live/section syllabi and may be processed daily. For example, if your SIS contains only instructor information and course meeting times consistently, then this is the only data that should be pushed from the SIS into Concourse, and it should be fed into live syllabi. Once you have determined a schema for populating syllabus items from the SIS, work with your IT personnel to generate Item Feeds that push content (in html format) into courses based on their external identifiers. We recommend that you test out all new feeds in your sandbox before trying them in the production environment. When you feel confident that feeds are producing item content as expected, work to implement automated feeds on a cadence that meets your institution’s needs.
- Better For: This option is used most often by institutions that have one or more categories of syllabus data readily available and easily accessible within the SIS. This approach is most effective when the SIS admin, IT staff, and Concourse admin are able to collaborate on developing and processing Item Feeds. Institutions that do not have IT staff available to support feed processing may do better to consider advising high-level users to input data from the SIS manually or delegate the population of certain syllabus items on live syllabi to instructors.
- Advantages and Disadvantages of Sourcing Data from the SIS: Your SIS likely contains very carefully reviewed, accurate, updated data about courses at your institution. The SIS is probably used to generate course shells in the LMS, as well as other course tools, and as a result, using data available in the SIS to populate Concourse syllabi supports data consistency across the platforms you use. It also minimizes the amount of time required to populate a tremendous amount of syllabus data. However, If there is a discrepancy in the way the SIS presents data, feeds from the SIS will continue to present erroneous data in Concourse until the SIS is updated. When data conflicts like this occur, the SIS Admin and Concourse System Admin must work together to confirm the error and determine how and when the SIS will be updated to push accurate information to Concourse. One drawback of using feeds to populate syllabus items (regardless of source of truth) is that feeds can only populate Items, not subitems. If the source of truth contains data that should appear in syllabus subitems, that data must be entered manually.
- Effort: After the initial development and feed testing processes, generating and processing automated Item Feeds from SIS data requires little manual intervention to populate or update a large amount of syllabus content in a matter of seconds. It is a good idea for domain users to review live syllabi prior to or at the start of each term to ensure content is being created as expected.
- Approach: Review the data available in your catalog tool for completeness and accuracy and determine how the available data aligns with syllabus items in Concourse. Determine which syllabus items will be populated using this data, whether information from the catalog will be added to template syllabi or to live/section syllabi, and how often the feeds will be processed. It’s likely that your catalog tool contains course information that doesn’t change regularly, such as course descriptions and objectives; in which case, the catalog might be the source of truth for course descriptions and objectives and the resulting Item Feeds might be used to populate or update course templates once per year. Once you have determined a schema for populating syllabus items from the catalog, work with your IT personnel to generate Item Feeds that push content (in html format) into courses based on their external identifiers. We recommend that you test out all new feeds in your sandbox before trying them in the production environment. When you feel confident that feeds are producing item content as expected, work to implement automated feeds on a cadence that meets your institution’s needs.
- Better For: This option is used most often by institutions that have one or more categories of syllabus data readily available and easily accessible within a catalog tool. This approach is most effective when the tool’s database admin, IT staff, and Concourse admin are able to collaborate on developing and processing Item Feeds. Institutions that do not have IT staff available to support feed processing may do better to consider advising high-level users to input data from the catalog tool manually.
- Advantages and Disadvantages of Sourcing Data from the Catalog Tool: Like the SIS, you can trust that your catalog tool is a reliable source of truth for generating syllabus content. Note that Item Feeds require item content to be formatted in html, so some manipulation of catalog data may be needed before the feed file is ready for processing. Once you have codified a process for generating Item Feed files, this process gets a tremendous amount of consistent, accurate data into your Concourse syllabi very quickly. One drawback of using feeds to populate syllabus items (regardless of source of truth) is that feeds can only populate Items, not subitems. If the source of truth contains data that should appear in syllabus subitems, that data must be entered manually. Additionally, be aware that catalogs usually contain course data that is useful for syllabus templates, but a second source of truth may be needed if you wish to populate live syllabi with section-specific information.
- Effort: After the initial development and feed testing processes, generating and processing automated Item Feeds from catalog data requires little manual intervention to populate or update a large amount of syllabus content in a matter of seconds. It is a good idea for domain users to review syllabus templates regularly to ensure content continues to be created as expected.
- Approach: Work with academic leaders at your institution to determine where accurate course data is stored, such as in department shared drives, and how complete the data is. If this content contains inaccuracies, it’s a good idea to update the source of truth prior to beginning work in Concourse. Next, confirm how existing course data aligns with Concourse syllabus items. In other words, identify how your course content will be added to the syllabus item names you chose. Next, designate domain users to edit, audit (if enabled in your system), and review course templates, and train domain users on essential Concourse functionality. Make sure that domain users understand what templates they are responsible for editing, what items they will edit on assigned templates, and what the timeline is for completion. Once the editing process is complete, domain auditors and/or reviewers ensure data accuracy before templates are cloned to create live courses. This process is completed as often as necessary, but typically occurs once per academic year. Any syllabus items not manually edited by domain users should be edited by instructors on live/section syllabi.
- Better For: This option is used most often by institutions that do not have syllabus content readily available in systems that can easily be queried to generate an Item Feed file. Because this approach relies on individuals to populate syllabus content manually, it is most effective when there is a group of reliable, knowledgeable academic leaders who have the capacity to enter syllabus data from shared repositories in multiple syllabus templates. Information that is subject to change regularly, such as instructor information and course meeting times, is generally left up to the end user to populate in live/section syllabi.
- Advantages and Disadvantages of Sourcing Data from Shared Drives and Other Repositories: While some data sources support the usage of Item Feeds, data sources like shared drives cannot easily be used to create feeds and therefore require a significant amount of manual effort, typically requiring a team of academic leaders to invest several hours each in editing multiple syllabus templates. If your institution has a very large number of syllabus templates and/or a small group of domain users to edit templates, this process can be time consuming and can delay Concourse implementation or the launch of syllabi for a new term. Once syllabus templates are manually populated with data from external sources, however, the data is cloned into live/section syllabi and requires only minor review on that level. Depending on the frequency of updates to course-specific information like descriptions and objectives, this is a process that may only occur once per academic year.
- Effort: This approach requires the most time and effort to implement and complete. Depending on the amount of content being edited, the number of templates being edited, and the number of editors participating, individual editors can plan to spend several hours editing their assigned templates by copying content from the identified source of truth. Because manual processes are more susceptible to human error, it’s also important to incorporate a review process to ensure the accuracy and consistency of data in templates, and so additional personnel should be assigned to review templates, at an investment of several hours each.
Post-Decision Changes
Your institution’s needs may change over time and you may need to make changes to your configuration settings. In other words, the configuration decisions you make during the implementation phase might not be as efficient five or ten years afterward. Review the guidance below to better understand how changing this particular decision may affect your Concourse system or deployment in the future.
- Generate an Item Report of impacted syllabi in your system to assess the current state of content and review it for accuracy.
- Based on the data in the Item Report, you may find that the content previously fed into the item does not match the content in the new data source. If a discrepancy exists between current and anticipated content, be aware that changing the Item Feed source will result in the current content being overwritten. If this is the case:
- Confirm whether impacted syllabi need to be preserved in their current state before changing the Item Feed’s data source.
- If past syllabi should be preserved, use the Bulk Download tool to create PDF copies of syllabi in their current state.
- Work with the admin of the current data source to plan a wind-down of Item Feeds from that tool.
- Work with the admin of the new data source and your IT team to implement Item Feed file generation and processing via job scheduling software.
- You may need to communicate the following with the IT team:
- Concourse feed documentation
- The types of data needed for the Item Feed
- The frequency and timing of feed processing.
- Ensure that your IT team has access to the Concourse sandbox.
- Test the new Item Feed in your sandbox prior to processing the feed in the production environment. Once you have confirmed that feeds are creating data as expected in the sandbox, you can start processing feeds in your production environment.
- Generate an Item Report of impacted syllabi in your system to assess the current state of content and review it for accuracy.
- Based on the data in the Item Report, you may find that the content that was manually populated in syllabi does not match the content in the new data source. If a discrepancy exists between current and anticipated content, be aware that implementing Item Feeds will result in the current content being overwritten. If this is the case:
- Confirm whether impacted syllabi need to be preserved in their current state before implementing Item Feeds.
- If past syllabi should be preserved, use the Bulk Download tool to create PDF copies of syllabi in their current state.
- Communicate to domain users and Course Managers that their role in template development will no longer include populating and editing the specific item; if their role is shifting to auditing or reviewing the item, but sure to update domain permissions and communicate new expectations.
- If Item Feeds will be used to populate an item that was previously edited manually by instructors, inform instructors how this change will impact their Concourse experience so that they do not misinterpret the new content as a system error.
- Update all training materials and job aids to ensure that users have the correct guidance about each syllabus item.
- Work with the admin of the chosen data source and your IT team to implement Item Feed file generation and processing via job scheduling software.
- You may need to communicate the following with the IT team:
- Concourse feed documentation
- The types of data needed for the Item Feed
- The frequency and timing of feed processing.
- Ensure that your IT team has access to the Concourse sandbox.
- Test the new Item Feed in your sandbox prior to processing the feed in the production environment. Once you have confirmed that feeds are creating data as expected in the sandbox, you can start processing feeds in your production environment.
When Concourse institutions implement Item Feeds from the SIS or catalog tool to populate syllabus content, they rarely, if ever, revert to manual input from a different source. It is more likely that an institution would choose a different tool as the data source for Item Feeds and follow the steps outlined above to change the data source in existing feeds. If any issues arise with the quality of data in the data source, it is recommended that automated feeds be paused until the data quality issue is resolved in the data source tool.
Note that if you request domain users to edit content in syllabus items that are usually populated via feed and feeds are still being processed, any manual changes to the item content will be overwritten the next time the feed is processed; it is better to pause feeds and make changes as needed within the data source.
Before making a decision about how to source data for your Concourse syllabi, you should be familiar with some related issues and contexts. See the following articles for more information about using feeds to get data from different sources into Concourse:
- Learn how to Construct and Process Item Feeds.
- Read about how easy it is to Automate Feed Processing to streamline your syllabus management processes.
If your institution chooses to manually populate syllabi from other sources of truth, review our
Instructor Training Templates to get an idea of how you can prepare your users to undertake this task.
Tell Us About Your Experience
Did this article answer your question? If you made a decision like this for your Concourse instance, let us know how it turned out. If we missed something in this article or if you have a question that isn’t addressed in our Knowledge Base, let us know how we can help by reaching out to
support@campusconcourse.com.