Synopsis
Once courses are created in Concourse, their syllabi can be populated to contain the correct language that reflects your institutional policies and procedures. Content is added to syllabus items, which you can think of as the different headings, components, or building blocks of a syllabus. The use of syllabus items is only available for structured systems (not unstructured/uploaded syllabi); syllabus content can only be provisioned into unstructured systems by
uploading syllabus files. If your institution has opted for an unstructured Concourse system but you are interested in using syllabus items,
reach out to Client Services to discuss whether a structured system is right for you.
Item content can be provisioned and synchronized in different ways to ensure that Concourse syllabi contain data consistent with your other systems. Your institution can choose to provision and synchronize item content via feed, manual editing, or a combination of both techniques. Many institutions use both options, populating selected syllabus items by Item Feed and directing instructors and other syllabus editors on how to populate the remaining syllabus items manually. If you opt to use both approaches, there is no minimum or maximum number of items that must be populated manually or via feed. Continue reading for more information to help you choose the right option for your institution.
Key Terms
- Course: the artifact in Concourse that contains the syllabus.
- Template: a course whose syllabus contains standard item content that will be cloned (i.e., copied) into non-template (i.e., 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.
- Sub-item: a “child” or sub-category of related content in a syllabus that is added to a specific “parent” item; for example, the item Evaluation has two sub-items: Criteria and Breakdown. Sub-items can be added to syllabi in multiples.
- Feed: a data file that is used to migrate information from external systems to Concourse; feeds can be automated or processed manually.
- Group Permissions: a setting that determines how each of seven user groups engages with each syllabus item; group permissions function at the syllabus level but can be set in a number of ways.
- End users: typically students, instructors, and other syllabus managers. End users typically engage with syllabi individually and do not need large-scale access to system data for management or reporting purposes.
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 SIS admin, academic stakeholders involved with curriculum development and accreditation compliance, and IT staff involved with data management.
Syllabus content should be consistent across your institutional systems to support accreditation goals, institutional effectiveness reporting, and student outcomes. How item data, such as course descriptions, is provisioned into Concourse depends on the consistency and availability of data in your other systems, the bandwidth of syllabus editors, and other institution-specific factors.
This decision is typically made during the implementation phase, but the method of item content creation and synchronization can be changed afterward if your institution’s needs change.
- If your institution processes Item Feeds:
- Data is queried from the SIS to generate Item Feeds. 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 manually edits syllabus items:
- A high-level user, like a System Admin, assigns other users domain edit permission and confirms that instructors and other editing roles have correct group permissions to edit items on syllabi (templates and non-templates).
- All users in editing roles receive training on adding and editing syllabus item content in the Concourse interface. Users may generate content in the interface or paste in content from other sources (e.g., Word/Docs, a shared drive, a catalog, website).
- Depending on the user’s role and your institution’s integrations, users may access Concourse via the LMS or SSO portal.
- Item Feeds can be automated or processed manually to populate and synchronize item content from your external systems; note that sub-item content cannot be edited with feeds. To learn more about automated feeds, see our knowledge base article on Automated Feed Processing. Item feeds can be generated manually using the data guidelines in Construct and Process Item Feeds. To manually process an Item Feed:
- Admin > Tools
- Feed Processing
- In the Type dropdown menu, locate the Syllabus Content area and then select the item being populated by the feed.
- Select File > Select the feed file from your device
- Process
- Item and sub-item content can be populated and modified manually by users with group permissions that allow them to edit an item. Item modifications may be made on templates or non-templates depending on applied group permissions to the course in question. To edit an item:
- Select the Syllabus dropdown in the syllabus navigation menu (secondary navigation menu.
- Edit
- On the left side of the syllabus, select the Edit icon (pencil icon in a yellow square) next to the item or sub-item you wish to edit.
- Paste or type content in appropriate data fields for the item or sub-item.
- Save
Choose the method that best supports your other systems, processes, and staff. Some options for course data provisioning will be more efficient than others, and some may not be feasible given your institutional contexts. For example, your institution might require that Course Descriptions, Objectives, and Outcomes be included in syllabi to meet accreditation standards, but only descriptions are stored in a central repository. As a result, it would probably be most efficient to use Item Feeds for Course Descriptions and manually populate Objectives and Outcomes from various sources. The long-term impact of this decision is a system that efficiently manages syllabus content that is consistent and accurate across your systems.
Configuration Options
Concourse provides different options for provisioning and synchronizing item content to support different institutional contexts. We recommend that you review these options carefully before deciding which option best meets your needs.
- Option A: Manually Edit Syllabi
- Option B: Process Item Feeds
Continue reading for more information about each option.
- Approach: Users with edit permissions on syllabus items are trained to use the Concourse editing interface to add and modify syllabus content. Users with domain edit permissions then add syllabus content to template syllabi by manually entering or pasting content from another system; item content added to templates cascades to lower-linked templates and is eventually copied to non-templates, also called section syllabi or live syllabi. Instructors or course managers then manually add or paste content for all remaining syllabus items on their assigned section syllabi.
- Better For: Item content population exclusively through manual editing is used most often by institutions that either do not have complete course data maintained in a single source of truth or that do not have IT staff available to support the processing of feeds. This approach is also supportive of institutions that have a higher degree of flexibility in some item content (e.g., instructor choice).
- Advantages and Disadvantages of Manually Editing Syllabi: An advantage of manually editing syllabi is that it allows instructors to include their unique course information that isn’t captured elsewhere; encouraging or requiring instructors to participate in the syllabus creation process can also improve adoption of Concourse throughout your institution. Disadvantages of manually editing syllabi include the potential for human error when entering content and the length of time it takes to complete the editing process each term.
- Effort: The time investment for manually editing syllabi can be significant depending on the number of editors involved and the amount of items that will be edited. Each institution takes a different approach to training end users, which results in different amounts of effort required. Another consideration is that the amount of time and effort to manage a smaller content development effort is naturally less than managing a larger content development effort; regardless, syllabus editors must be provided sufficient time to add, revise, and review content accordingly. Whereas feeds can be processed nearly instantaneously, manual editing may occur over the course of several weeks. After syllabus content is populated, it is strongly recommended that domain reporters or other academic stakeholders review the content with Concourse’s many available reports to ensure consistency and accuracy. This reporting period may take an additional week or more.
- Approach: For automated feed processing, a member of your institution’s IT staff writes a generation script (SQL is often used for this purpose) to create Item files from data in your Student Information System; the Item Feed is then transmitted to Concourse via POST over HTTPS. Once feeds are confirmed to create item content as expected, this process can be automated with PowerShell or other job scheduling software. Feed files can be created manually, but this approach is not recommended for Item Feeds due to the required HTML formatting of item content in feed data fields and the high likelihood of error. If your institution generates feed files automatically, those files can be manually processed in Concourse at a cadence that fits your needs to automatically accommodate for changes to item content. Item Feeds can only populate items; sub-items can only be populated manually or by copying content from another syllabus.
- Better For: Processing Item Feeds is something that many institutions do selectively for a few syllabus items, not all. It is not common for institutions to populate all syllabus items via Item Feed. Using Item Feeds to populate selected syllabus items is used most often by institutions that keep updated, consistent course data, such as course descriptions and learning objectives, collected in a single platform (source of truth) that can be queried to generate a feed file. The processing of Item Feeds requires the support of your IT team, so this approach is more successful for institutions whose IT staff have the bandwidth and ability to support automated feed processing.
- Advantages and Disadvantages of Processing Item Feeds: The benefits of processing Item Feeds include a high degree of consistency across syllabi and the ability to quickly update content to match other systems. Item Feeds reduce the risk of human error with data entry and ensure that syllabus content matches your SIS and other systems exactly. Additionally, when information in the source of truth changes, automated feeds can push updated content to syllabus items nearly immediately without a lot of manual effort. A limitation of Item Feeds is that they only populate and synchronize item content and cannot be used to provision sub-items. If your institution has uniform sub-item content that should appear in syllabi, that content should be added manually to templates, where it will cascade down to linked templates and eventually into non-templates.
- Effort: After the initial development process, using Item Feeds requires little manual intervention. It is a good idea to review feed generation and formatting practices as part of regular system maintenance to ensure that items are being populated and updated as expected. We recommend that feed files be generated and processed manually at first to ensure accuracy of data.
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.
Again, keep in mind that it is not common for an institution to provision and synchronize item content entirely via Feed. The majority of institutions manually edit at least some syllabus items and may populate other items via feed; many institutions manually edit all syllabus items. The guidance below should be considered as it applies on an item-by-item basis.
If your institution initially provisions item content via manual editing and later decides to switch to processing Item Feeds, you will need to:
- Determine whether the syllabus item is general to the course and should be fed into template syllabi or if the item is specific to unique sections and should be fed into section syllabi; work with the Concourse System Admin or SIS admin to pull external course IDs for relevant courses in the feed.
- If syllabus item content will change on templates or past courses, we recommend that you generate a bulk download to maintain archival copies of the previous versions.
- Determine the source of truth for the syllabus item (e.g., SIS) and work with the system admin to generate feed files that match the format Concourse requires.
- Work with a member of your IT staff to implement feed processing (automated if possible).
- Contact Concourse to request that your sandbox be refreshed.
- Test all new feeds in your sandbox prior to processing feeds in the production environment. Once you have confirmed that item content is being populated via feeds as expected in the sandbox, process the feeds in your production environment.
- Change group permissions as needed to prevent users from editing item content that is now populated via feed.
- Inform users in editing roles which item(s) will no longer need manual editing and how this change impacts their processes and workload.
If your institution initially provisions item content via feeds and later decides to switch to manual editing, you will need to:
- Consult with your SIS admin and IT staff to determine when to discontinue Item Feeds.
- If syllabus item content will change on templates or past courses, we recommend that you generate a bulk download to maintain archival copies of the previous versions.
- Change group permissions as needed to allow users to edit item content that was previously populated via feed.
- Inform users in editing roles which item(s) will now need manual editing and how this change impacts their processes and workload.
- Provide training and reference materials to assist editors with populating and modifying the new item.
- Develop and implement an approach for reporting on syllabus item content. We recommend starting with a Multi-Item: Tabular Report.
Before making a decision about provisioning and synchronizing item content, you should be familiar with some related issues and contexts. See the following articles for more information:
- Find out more about the default syllabus items in Concourse.
- Read about how group permissions work to give users permission to edit syllabus items.
- Learn how to Construct and Process Item Feeds.
- Review the functionality of Linked Course Templates and the Relationship Between Templates, Courses, and Sections before deciding where content should be added in your template hierarchy.
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.