Synopsis
Templates are an integral component of structured Concourse systems. They allow institutions to standardize syllabus language, such as institutional policies and course descriptions. The content that appears on templates can have wide-ranging impacts in your system, and as a result, templates must be administered carefully at each stage, from creation to population to review. The way that your institution administers templates depends on many factors, including the professional bandwidth of academic personnel, the domain setup of your Concourse system, and the template hierarchy that is used. Depending on your unique Concourse setup and institutional needs, it’s possible to use one of the approaches explained below or to combine elements of different approaches to suit your needs. Read on to learn more about the options available.
Key Terms
- Domain: an organizational unit within Concourse; default domain labels are Campus, School, and Department.
- Course: the artifact in Concourse that contains the syllabus.
- Template: a course whose syllabus contains standard item content that will be cloned into non-template (i.e., live/section) syllabi; instructors and students are typically not registered to templates.
- 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.
- Managers: a user group registered to specific courses within a domain; users assigned to the Manager role are able to access, edit, and audit assigned syllabi.
- Registration Feed: a data feed that registers users to courses in a specific role; Registration Feeds are an option to add users to courses as Managers if they cannot be enrolled in the appropriate role via the LMS.
- Domain users: users with permission to administer, edit, audit, or report upon all courses/syllabi in an entire domain. These users are typically academic leaders who are familiar with the syllabus language and requirements for entire departments, programs, or other organizational units.
- Domain Permissions: the permission to view, manage, report upon, and/or modify syllabi for entire domains; four types of domain permissions are available: administer, edit, audit, and report.
- Domain Permissions Report: a report that presents a list of users with domain permissions; each user’s assigned permission(s) and the domain(s) where it applies are included in the report.
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.
Academic leaders and staff whose work is related to accreditation and compliance or the syllabus development process should be consulted when making this decision. It’s also a good idea to consult academic stakeholders who are familiar with the workload expectations of personnel at your institution. Although it may seem like one option for template administration is a good fit for your institution, you should consult with academic leaders to confirm that such a distribution of template administration duties is allowable and appropriate given the relevant personnel’s scope of responsibilities or contractual requirements.
Templates are used to ensure that your institution’s syllabi contain approved, standardized language. If that language is readily available in other systems, it may be possible to automate the population of template syllabi via feed, in which case, domain users need only review syllabi for accuracy and completion. If this information is not readily available in other systems or if your institution prefers more oversight of the syllabus development process, users can edit and review templates as domain users or Course Managers. The distribution of these permissions depend upon your organizational complexity, the availability of personnel to support the template development process, and other factors.
Template administration responsibilities (domain permissions or Course Manager role) are typically assigned to users during the implementation process. It’s important to note, however, that these permissions are likely to change over time. As individuals’ roles at your institution change, their involvement with Concourse may also change, necessitating updates to domain permissions or course roles. We recommend reviewing how institutional roles align with Concourse permissions as part of your regular system maintenance to ensure that your templates are maintained accurately.
The main consideration for connected systems is how you would like your domain users and Course Managers to access Concourse. If you opt to have domain users administer templates, they may access Concourse:
- Via your SSO portal. Users who access Concourse via the SSO portal land on their Concourse homepage and must then search for the courses they would like to administer, edit, audit, or report upon.
- Via a Concourse administrator or gateway course in your LMS. If this option is selected, domain users are registered to a specific, non-academic course shell in your LMS. When domain users select the Concourse link in this administrator or gateway course, they land on their Concourse homepage and must search for courses to be administered.
Course Managers typically login through the LMS. There are two options for the Manager experience:
- Since Managers are registered to the syllabus in Concourse, they can select the Concourse link in any LMS shell and within Concourse, navigate to the homepage. All courses for which they are registered will appear on the homepage without additional searching.
- Alternatively, Managers can be registered to the relevant LMS course shells and select the Concourse link within each course shell individually to land on its respective syllabus.
To assign domain permissions, users with Set Domain Permissions system permissions should:
- Locate the user account in Concourse (Admin > Users > search for user > select appropriate user's account).
- Select Edit in the Settings block.
- Select the domain combination(s) where the user should have domain permissions. If you select a domain combination that does not exist in your system, the user’s permissions will not update.
- Select the permission(s) the user should have.
- Select Set Permissions.
To manually register users to a course as Managers, Domain Administrators should:
- Navigate to the course where the user should be registered as a Manager.
- In the syllabus navigation menu, select Users.
- Select Add Users in the Course Users table.
- Enter the email address associated with the user’s Concourse account.
- Select Managers in the group dropdown menu.
- Select Add.
- If the user is already registered to the course in a different role, locate their name in the Course Users table and update their group in the column labeled Group and Save.
A
Registration Feed is a quick and easy way to register many users to specific courses as Managers simultaneously. To use this method, follow the instructions for Registration Feeds in
Construct and Process System Data Feeds.
The method you choose for administering templates should strive to balance accuracy of content, quality assurance, and a realistic workload for your personnel. For example, standardized course content may be readily available to provision to templates via feed, but you probably want to include some measure of human oversight to weed out any errors or outdated information. On the other hand, asking academic leaders to modify course templates likely ensures accurate, carefully reviewed course information, but that might be too labor-intensive given your academic staff’s other responsibilities. Choose the combination of options that is most sustainable long-term.
Configuration Options
Your institution’s approach to administering templates will be informed by a number of factors, including the number of templates in your system, the template hierarchy setup, overall organizational complexity, and your institution’s approach to role-based access. Note that Domain Permissions are set on accounts individually and Course Managers can be registered for courses at any time, so it is possible to adjust your distribution of template administration responsibilities as needed. Options for administering your templates include:
- Option A: Administer Templates Only with Domain Users
- Option B: Administer Templates with Feeds and Domain Users
- Option C: Administer Templates with Course Managers and Domain Users
Regardless of the approach you choose, Domain Administrators must be involved at some level because there are some functions that only Domain Admins can perform manually, such as managing course registration, editing course metadata, and reviewing course analytics. The question, then, is whether to administer your templates solely through domain users or through a combination of domain users and feeds or Course Managers.
Once you determine how to involve domain users in template administration, you must assign domain permissions appropriately to fit your institution’s needs–administer, edit, audit, or report–and train each domain user on what their role is able and expected to do within Concourse. Additionally, it’s important that you clarify for each domain user or user group what their purview is (e.g., templates, live syllabi, or both and in which domain), what syllabus item(s) they are responsible for managing, and how the process and timeline fits into their workload. Clear communication from your Concourse team to high-level users is crucial to your long-term success.
If the choices below don’t fit your needs, reach out to Client Services for assistance.
- Approach: Determine which syllabus items are to be populated and maintained on templates, as well as the template level on which the items will be added (institutional, mid-level, or course). With an understanding of the amount of content being curated, determine the number of domain users needed to support the manual editing, auditing (if enabled in your system), and reporting process, how the work will be distributed, how the process will be monitored, and what the timeline is. When assigning domain permissions, keep in mind that your domain setup determines the domains where users’ permissions apply. If your system’s templates are in a Template > Template > Template hierarchy, all domain users can be assigned their appropriate permissions for that same domain; if your system’s templates are housed within academic units, such as Main Campus > Template > Biology, then users have to be assigned domain permissions for their unique domain combinations. After assigning domain permissions manually (see “Method” in Important to this Decision above), be sure to provide adequate training and support for the editing and content review processes, especially at high-activity times.
- Better For: This option is used most often by institutions that do not have template content readily available for feed construction; that have less complicated organizational structures; or that have fewer templates to manage.
- Advantages and Disadvantages of Administering Templates Only with Domain Users: Users who are assigned domain permissions tend to be department/program chairs or deans, who usually have significant workloads. As a result, finding time to attend training and work within Concourse may be challenging for these users. Likewise, this approach relies on academic leaders manually editing an entire domain or program’s templates; as a result, this approach requires the most time to edit templates. On the other hand, because a limited number of users are responsible for a large number of templates, this approach tends to result in a high level of consistency across templates.
- Effort: This approach relies heavily on the ability of a limited group of users to manage the process and can be a heavy lift. When planning how a group of domain users will administer templates, consider the time required for training, syllabus modification, and quality assurance reviews, as well as effort that must be placed into supporting these high-level users. With this approach and the approach to administer templates with domain users and course managers, we encourage you to be very thoughtful and intentional about how you will train and support domain users (e.g., training materials/sessions, job aids, mentors). If templates are also manually populated and edited by this group, it’s reasonable to provide domain users with a window of several weeks for this task, depending on the number of templates that are being managed.
- Approach: Determine which syllabus items are to be populated and maintained on templates, as well as the template level on which the items will be added (institutional, mid-level, or course). Discover which of these items’ content exists in other systems and can be provisioned into Concourse via Item Feeds. Work with your IT staff to develop and implement Item Feeds in your Concourse sandbox and then production environment. Domain Administrators or Editors will be required to populate any remaining template items manually, and Domain Auditors (optional system configuration) and Reporters will be required if you wish to review the content added to templates for accuracy and completion. With an understanding of the amount of content being curated, determine the number and type of domain users needed to support the manual template maintenance processes, how the work will be distributed, how the process will be monitored, and what the timeline is. After assigning domain permissions manually (see “Method” in Important to this Decision above), be sure to provide adequate training and support for the editing and content review processes, especially at high-activity times.
- Better For: This option is used most often by institutions that have template content readily available for feed construction or that have more templates and/or template content to manage.
- Advantages and Disadvantages of Administering Templates with Feeds and Domain Users: Populating template content via Item Feeds is extremely quick, requires little manual intervention, and ensures that the selected items match your other systems exactly (consistent data). However, if your domain users find errors in content that is populated via Item Feeds, the feed files themselves must be corrected, otherwise the problem will persist; if Domain Editors manually change content in items normally populated via Item Feed, the next time the feed is processed, the manual changes will be overwritten by the feed. Overall, this approach typically requires less time for template development and requires less effort from your high-level users.
- Effort: With this approach, we can assume that the majority of content being added to course templates (e.g., course descriptions, materials) is automated with the support of your SIS admin and IT staff. As a result, domain users primarily serve to review course templates and make minor modifications as needed; domain users are still asked to do essential quality assurance functions in Concourse, but the overall effort expended is less than with the domain users-only approach. As a result, less time is spent training domain users on syllabus functionality, and the window for preparing templates shrinks as well. The training focus and human effort is diverted instead to auditing (if enabled in your system) and reporting. Higher-level templates, such as the Institutional Template and mid-level templates would likely still need some manual intervention from a designated group of domain users.
- Approach: Course Managers are typically registered to a limited syllabus set within a domain rather than an entire domain’s templates; as a result, a large number of Course Managers are highly trained to edit small numbers of templates across your system. You may assign Course Managers to edit whatever number of templates is appropriate given the scope of their role at your institution and specific to Concourse. It is possible to use a mix of Course Managers and Domain Editors to distribute the workload of populating template content. No matter which users edit templates, the audit and reporting functions are limited to domain users. Determine how to distribute these review permissions to quickly and accurately confirm template content. After assigning domain permissions manually and registering Course Managers to specific templates via Registration Feed, be sure to provide adequate training and support for the editing and content review processes, especially at high-activity times.
- Better For: This option is used most often by institutions that do not have template content readily available for feed construction; that have more complicated organizational structures; or that have a large number of templates to manage.
- Advantages and Disadvantages of Administering Templates with Course Managers and Domain Users: While this approach does require significant manual intervention overall, the more widely template management roles are distributed in your Concourse system, the shorter the editing and review timeline can be. For example, one domain editor needs far more time to edit fifty templates than a group of five Course Managers would need to edit ten templates each. A potential drawback of this method is that with more users making manual changes to templates, the likelihood of errors and inconsistencies across your templates increases. As a result, the review and revision process is especially important to this approach to result in consistent, accurate data.
- Effort: The time and effort required for any human-driven process is significant. With this approach, however, the majority of effort is spent on training and supporting Course Managers and domain users, while the effort to develop and review syllabi is constrained because it is more broadly distributed. Preparing the training and support plan, assigning domain permissions, and registering Course Managers appropriately takes careful planning, clear communication, and a combination of manual intervention and feeds in Concourse. Once this front-loading is completed by a System Administrator, the effort shifts to differentiated training based on users’ roles and responsibilities in Concourse. Depending on the amount of templates assigned to each user for populating/editing and/or review, the template development process can last from one to several weeks. Because the roles and responsibilities are distributed widely in this approach, it’s also a good idea to have a designated user or users responsible for managing overall progress.
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.
No matter how you start or change your approach to template administration, domain users will be involved. Whether you increase domain users to stop relying on feeds or Course Managers, or decrease domain users to distribute labor more broadly, the steps are essentially the same:
- Generate a Domain Structure Report, Domain Permissions Report, and Item Report of templates to confirm that the distribution of Domain Permissions adequately meets your institution’s needs and is feasible given domain users’ workloads.
- A user with the ability to Set Domain Permissions should make adjustments to users’ Domain Permissions, adding or removing permissions as needed.
- Inform users if their Concourse roles and responsibilities have changed as well as what the new expectations of their involvement are.
- Support new domain users with training sessions and asynchronous reference materials.
- Ensure that domain users know what items they should edit, audit, or report upon in templates, what the source of truth is for each syllabus item, and what the timeline is.
If you choose to involve Course Managers in template administration, you should:
- Determine whether Course Managers will be responsible for editing some or all templates in a domain. In other words, how are editing responsibilities being distributed among Course Managers and domain users?
- Determine how domain users’ responsibilities will shift. For example, will Domain Editors still be editing a portion of templates? Are Domain Editors needed with the inclusion of Course Managers? Is it a better use of resources to shift domain users from content generation to content review?
- A user with the ability to Set Domain Permissions should make adjustments to users’ Domain Permissions, adding or removing permissions as needed.
- Identify the Course Managers and the courses that they will manage.
- Generate and process a Registration Feed to add Course Managers to templates.
- Determine how Course Managers will access Concourse (e.g., still via the LMS or through an admin portal) and provide access instructions.
- Support Course Managers with training sessions and asynchronous reference materials. Especially helpful is guidance about how to search for templates versus non-templates.
- Ensure that Course Managers know what templates they are responsible for editing, what items they should edit in templates, what the source of truth is for each syllabus item, and what the timeline is.
- Inform domain users about the inclusion of Course Managers in template development or maintenance as well as how domain users’ roles may change.
- Provide training for domain users, if needed, to support their possible transition to a more supervisory or observational role in the template development process.
If you opt to stop using Course Managers, they can be removed from Templates with a
Drop Registration Feed. Domain users should be informed of how their roles and responsibilities will change due to the removal of Course Managers from the template administration process.
If you choose to start processing Item Feeds to populate templates, you should:
- Confirm what template items can be populated with content from external systems.
- Generate an Item Report of templates in your system to review the current content and compare it to data from your other systems.
- Determine if there are any discrepancies between existing content and content that will be fed in.
- Because Item Feeds overwrite existing syllabus content, you should consult academic stakeholders about whether overwriting existing content with content from the SIS (if there are any discrepancies) is acceptable.
- If older versions of templates need to be preserved before implementing Item Feeds, use the Bulk Download tool to create PDF copies of templates in their pre-feed state.
- Work with a member of your IT staff to implement Item Feed processing (automated if possible).
- Contact Concourse to request that your sandbox be refreshed.
- Test Item Feeds in your sandbox prior to processing them 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.
- Inform domain users about the implementation of Item Feeds in template development or maintenance as well as how domain users’ roles may change (e.g., from editor to reviewer and on which items).
- Provide training for domain users, if needed, to support their possible transition to a more supervisory or observational role in the template development process.
If you use Item Feeds to populate templates and determine that a fully manual template administration approach is better for your needs, you can work with your IT staff to stop the processing of automated feeds. With feeds not being processed regularly, domain users and/or course managers are able to edit template content without the risk of it being overwritten.
Before making a decision about administering templates, you should be familiar with some related issues and contexts. See the following articles for more information:
- Register for our asynchronous training courses on Templates, Domain and System Permissions, and Group Permissions. They include recorded webinars, handouts, and other resources.
- Need more background information about templates? Check out Course Templates Explained.
- Learn more about Domain Permissions in Concourse and how to use Domain Reports to assess how to distribute domain permissions.
- If you’d like to learn more about Managers, check out our article about Group Permissions.
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.