Integrating Your Curriculum Management System with Your Course Catalog

March 12, 2020

Last updated: October 19, 2020

The line between what qualifies as curriculum management and what qualifies as catalog management can be blurry — your catalog content relies on changes to your curriculum, and your curriculum needs to reflect what's in your catalog. Some institutions have a rigid curriculum approval process in place, but need software to help them manage catalog changes; other institutions have a smooth process for producing their catalog, but need a way to systematically review and approve curriculum changes.

With all that in mind, Clean Catalog offers software that can be easily adapted to meet each institutions needs, whether they need curriculum management software with some course catalog capabilities, just course catalog software, or a full system for managing everything. Here are some of the features we offer for making your catalog and/or curriculum easier to manage.

Curriculum Management Tip

In our experience, different institutions can have very different needs for curriculum management. If you don't see exactly what you're looking for in our feature list, we can work with you to build it.

Customizable Software with the Features You Need

As part of the onboarding process with new customers, we work with you to determine your specific needs. For example, if you're going to be managing syllabi in our system, and ultimately want those syllabi attached to courses, we work with you to determine what data you want stored on the syllabi, what you want stored on the course, and how that information interacts. But if you're not going to be using syllabi, that information won't clutter up your interface.

For some customers, this means giving them a catalog management system that just allows them to manage catalog content — policies, course descriptions, degree descriptions, and things like that. For other customers, it means building out a curriculum management workflow where committees can edit content, submit it for approval, and, when it's approved, publish their changes in the final public-facing catalog.

We typically develop new features for free. Learn more about our free customizations for curriculum management software.

Seamlessly Transition Content from Curriculum to Catalog

Our curriculum management and course catalog systems effectively work as a single piece of software, so if you make a change to something like degree requirements, and those requirements go through the curriculum approval process, it's usually a one-click operation to publish those changes on your catalog — there's no need to transfer it to another system or to copy and paste to a separate document.

Our robust editorial workflows and permission management mean that you can let users make only the changes you want them to, which allows you to let users work on curriculum changes without worrying about them accidentally publishing those changes to your catalog. Or, if you want your curriculum users to be able to publish to the catalog, you can give them that permissions — permissions are customizable for whatever needs your institution has.

Easily Manage What Content Is Public and What's Private

Clean Catalog makes it easy to have content that's only accessible to authenticated users — or to a subset of users — and content that's fully public. For example, with Villanova University we have a private review process where users can comment on changes to course descriptions as part of the review process, but only the actual public content is shown to end users.

This also means that works-in-progress are hidden from public view — you can make draft changes to (for example) program outcomes, and those changes are hidden from public view until they've gone through the approval process and then been published.