Getting Started with Concourse

Getting Started with Concourse

Congratulations on your decision to bring Concourse to your institution! The Concourse team is 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 Questions

The categories below should help you as you begin to think about all of the common information that should be housed on syllabi, who should have the permissions to add or edit content, and more. These questions will also be discussed at length during your implementation process. We start with asking so many questions because every institution is unique, and you might have different goals or objectives with the Concourse platform than other institutions. 

Background

  1. How do you currently manage syllabi?
  2. What policies are in place related to syllabi?
  3. What tools do you use to support syllabus management?
  4. What are your goals for Concourse?

Content

  1. Where are the following maintained at your school?
    1. Institutional Policies
    2. Course Policies
    3. Course Descriptions
    4. Course Outcomes
    5. Program Outcomes
  2. How are syllabi reviewed for content, compliance, and completeness?

Item Permissions

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

Templates

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

Integration and Data

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

Deployment

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


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