Best Practices for Updating Course Catalogs

Although your course catalog will receive most of its traffic during enrollment periods, it’s important to keep your content up-to-date year-round to provide students, faculty, and staff with accurate information. An outdated or inconsistent catalog can lead to confusion and miscommunication, negatively impacting enrollment and student success. To protect against this, Clean Catalog software has built-in features that streamline the editing and updating process. By following best practices for catalog management and leveraging Clean Catalog’s features, institutions can ensure a seamless experience for all stakeholders.

Customize Approval Workflows

The first step of catalog management is to clearly outline the roles of staff members, faculty, and administrative staff in making catalog updates and additions. We can customize users to have different permission settings, allowing them to only edit content that is relevant to their department or role. Our staff can bulk upload users for your team, setting any granular user permissions that your institution would like to use. With user permissions created, you can then create custom workflows that content will flow through in the approval process. Whether this entails one approval or five approvals, you can ensure that all content updates are signed-off by the appropriate stakeholders. Users can also review where changes are in the approval process, preventing bottlenecks and clearly displaying whose action is needed.

Schedule Update Cycles

Institutions should establish a regular schedule for reviewing and updating the catalog, whether it be annually, biannually, or more frequently. This schedule should align with academic planning and registration cycles, ensuring that all changes are timely and relevant. Clean Catalog can also setup catalog staging, allowing your staff to edit the next year’s version of your catalog without impacting the current, live version. This ensures there is no downtime to your course catalog once you are ready to publish the new version.

Standardize Formatting and Layouts

Using standardized templates for course descriptions, electives, prerequisites, and credit hours promotes clarity and consistency throughout the catalog. Clean Catalog's user-friendly templates help streamline this process and ensure all content looks consistent and is complete upon publication. During the build-out phase of your catalog, our staff can also implement a style guide that dictates what fonts, colors, and brand elements should be used throughout your catalog. This takes out the guesswork for staff and ensures that all entries adhere to the same brand standards.

Record of Changes

Maintaining a clear version history for each catalog change is crucial. Clean Catalog’s revisions portal features enable institutions to track edits easily, revert changes, and facilitate accountability among contributors. Our software also allows for past catalog archives to be prominently displayed on your catalog site, along with any addendums you publish. This is frequently required by accrediting agencies, and Clean Catalog makes it easy to manage historical documents.

Monitor Compliance and Accreditation Standards

Ensuring that all updates comply with institutional policies and accreditation requirements is vital. Clean Catalog’s site audit tool makes it easy to identify any site errors, inconsistencies, broken links, or missing information. Reviewing your site audit regularly is a best practice and proactive approach to ensure your catalog is always performing and set up for success.

Keeping a course catalog updated is no small feat, but Clean Catalog software allows institutions to streamline the process and improve overall accuracy. By establishing clear processes, standardizing formatting, and utilizing digital tools for efficient editing, higher ed institutions can improve the performance of their catalogs. If you’re ready to take control of your course catalog updates and ensure a seamless editing process, reach out to us today!