Configuration Options: Enabling Curriculum Vitae

Configuration Options: Enabling Curriculum Vitae

Synopsis

The Curriculum Vitae (CV) feature allows registered users in your system to add CV content to their Concourse profiles. Users can add content to three rich text fields on their account pages:
  1. Education
  2. Experience
  3. Publications
When selected by administrators, CV content of specific user groups displays on courses and is visible to any user who can view the syllabus. Administrators can report upon CV completion to fulfill institutional requirements.

The CV feature is a system-wide configuration setting; if CVs are enabled, all users can add CV content. This feature is available for all Concourse systems, both structured and unstructured syllabi (uploaded files). This feature can be enabled at any time.

Key Terms

  1. Course: the artifact in Concourse that contains the syllabus; users are registered to the course, not the syllabus. CVs in Concourse are displayed in relation to the course, not in relation to the user’s profile.
  2. Group Permissions: the option to display editing user groups’ CVs is managed by domain administrators at the individual syllabus level or en masse.
  3. Curriculum Vitae Report: a course-level report available to users with domain administer or domain report permissions; this report displays the percent of each group’s CVs that are visible, the percentage of selected courses with at least one CV displayed, and the percentage of CVs with each content area populated.
  4. Statistics Report: a system-level report available to system admins, this report indicates which features are enabled or “On” in the Concourse environment. This is where a Concourse admin can confirm that CVs are turned on for the system.

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.
Key Players
Academic leaders and staff whose work is related to accreditation and compliance should be consulted when making this decision.
Consideration
When the Curriculum Vitae feature is enabled, group permissions can be set to display CV content on courses; any user who can view the course’s syllabus, including public users, can view CV content. As a result, it is important to train instructors about the type of information to include in their Concourse CVs. 
Timing
CVs can be enabled at any time. If end users are expected to add CV content to their Concourse profiles, using this feature should be included in training materials and presentations. We recommend consulting all other relevant timelines to ensure that the CV feature is enabled in your system in time to comply with external requirements, such as state legislation.

Connected Systems & Locations
The Curriculum Vitae feature is enabled at the system level, but displaying CVs is controlled per group per course. CV content is populated manually by users; CVs cannot be populated en masse or fed in from other systems.
Method
To enable CVs in your Concourse system, let your implementation team know. If your institution has completed the implementation process, you can email support@campusconcourse.com to make the request.
Motivation & Impact
Your institution may enable CVs to comply with state legislation about publication or sharing of instructor CVs; on the other hand, your institution may just want to make instructor qualifications visible to students and other end users.

Configuration Options

By default, the Curriculum Vitae feature is enabled in Concourse sandboxes but disabled in Concourse production environments. Feel free to try out the Curriculum Vitae feature in your sandbox environment to get a better sense of how it operates. Your institution may choose:
  1. Option A: Don’t Enable the CV Feature in your Production Environment
  2. Option B: Enable the CV Feature in your Production Environment
If you have questions about enabling or disabling the Curriculum Vitae feature after reading the options below, reach out to Client Services for guidance.
Option A: Don’t Enable the CV Feature in your Production Environment
  1. Approach: The Curriculum Vitae feature is disabled in your Concourse system by default. If you choose to leave this default setting in place, no action is required. If you leave the CV feature disabled, you may want to discuss other options for sharing faculty experience and qualifications with students and public viewers.
  2. Better For: This option is used most often by institutions that do not require instructors to publish their qualifications, such as educational background, teaching experience, and professional publications.
  3. Advantages of Not Enabling the CV Feature: Choosing not to enable CVs means less time spent training instructors how to populate the curriculum vitae fields in their profiles. It also means less time managing and reporting on CV completion each term.
  4. Effort: The time investment required for disabling the Curriculum Vitae feature is minimal; the Curriculum Vitae feature is disabled by default, so your team does not need to take any action if you do not want this feature available in your system.
Option B: Enable the CV Feature in your Production Environment
  1. Approach: To enable Curriculum Vitae in production, alert Client Services that you would like to opt into this feature. A member of Team Concourse will update your configuration settings and then this feature will be accessible on a system-wide level. All registered users in the system can then populate their Curriculum Vitae fields with content. Displaying CVs is set on a course-by-course basis using group permissions.
  2. Better For: This option is used most often by institutions that require instructors to publish their qualifications. Such institutional requirements are typically an effort to comply with state legislation regarding transparency in public higher education.
  3. Advantages of Enabling the CV Feature: Choosing to enable CVs improves the process of managing and reporting on CV completion each term. Instead of manually compiling and reviewing Vitae in a different tool, a reporter can review CVs in Concourse and use Concourse’s native CV Report to track completion and reach out to instructors who haven’t met requirements.
  4. Effort: The time investment required for enabling the Curriculum Vitae feature is minimal; a decision-maker on your Concourse team just has to submit a request to Team Concourse to update the configuration setting. Note that training materials should be updated to ensure that end users understand how to engage with this feature; the time required to update training materials is likely under an hour.

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.
Enabling Curriculum Vitae Later
If your institution decides to enable the CV feature later, you will need to:
  1. Update training materials and socialize the intended use and expectations for this feature to all instructors. 
  2. Manage group permissions to display CVs for users in instructional capacities.
  3. Determine a process and delegate responsibility for reporting upon CV completion.
The anticipated time investment for enabling CVs later depends on the extent of training and support your end users need.
Disabling Curriculum Vitae Later
If your institution initially decides to enable CVs but later disables the feature:
  1. CV content that was previously displayed on courses will no longer be visible to any user groups.
  2. If CV content should be preserved for use in other ways, a System Admin can download a CSV of the CV Content Report for posterity.
  3. CV editing will no longer be available on each user’s profile page.
The anticipated time investment for disabling CVs later is minimal. The removal of the feature from the Concourse interface should be socialized to users so it is not perceived as an error. The most time-consuming part of this transition is likely generating multiple CV Content Reports to keep data organized and usable.

Related Topics

Before making a decision about enabling CVs in your Concourse production system, you should be familiar with some related issues and contexts. See the following articles for more information:
  1. Curriculum Vitae Report
  2. User Management and Reporting
  3. Group Permissions
  4. Setting Initial Group Permissions
  5. Setting Group Permissions en Masse

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. 


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