Curriculum End-to-End Program

The Curriculum End-to-End Program will deliver new and improved digital tools to support the lifecycle of UQ’s curriculum.

Curriculum creation and delivery is core to the business of UQ: over 4500 staff deliver academic activities, including more than 8000 courses within the 400 programs offered at UQ. Current curriculum management processes and systems rely on manual steps, require duplication of content and leverage outdated and cumbersome systems. To ensure our choice of courses and programs remain relevant and viable, we need to evolve the curriculum. This requires a new tool set.

The Curriculum End-to-End Program (CEEP) will improve the design, approval, publishing, delivering and review of curriculum artefacts by implementing a new core curriculum management system named 'Jac'.

CEEP supports the Program Architecture Project (PA2). 

Benefits to UQ

A key objective of the Program Architecture Project is to deliver the foundations for a stronger and more sustainable portfolio of programs, plans and courses. CEEP supports this objective by:

• aiding the continuous evolution of curriculum
• allowing academics to focus on designing and delivering the curriculum, rather than the tools and processes
• enhancing the student digital experience by providing consistency when exploring study options, and the ability to validate progression and understand the impact of changes
• reducing manual duplication of content by effective and timely integration
• reducing the complexity of curriculum management
• providing a single source of truth for curriculum information
• supporting the Program Architecture Project objective of delivering the foundations for a stronger and more sustainable portfolio of programs, plans and courses.

Timeline

A 3-month pilot of the curriculum management system was successfully completed in December 2019. The feedback from both academic and administrative staff was positive, and implementation is now underway.

Jac will be delivered in stages. The initial release is scheduled for August 2020, with further work to be prioritised. Note that due to the impacts from COVID-19, scope and timeline may need to be further adjusted.

August 2020: initial release scope

• The system will allow staff to design curriculum artefacts, collaborate on changes, and progress those changes through approval workflows.
• The artefacts in scope include programs (including dual programs), plans, courses, shorter form credentials, and program requirements (which incorporate course lists).
• Jac will support mapping against Competency Tables that can be configured with assistance from the CEEP team.
• The system will support grouping artefacts into a Proposal and progressing those artefacts through the approval workflow together.
• Security roles and permissions will be delivered to ensure staff can complete their tasks within their assigned authority level. All changes will be auditable.
• Jac will be pre-loaded with the most recent versions of 2021 programs, courses and plans from SI-net at go-live and will then become the single source of truth for these artefacts.
• Integration with SI-net will remove the need for duplicate entry of program, plan and course data that is already entered in Jac. Fields not included in Jac in the initial release continue to be managed in SI-net.
• Jac will enable the creation of machine readable program requirements, with integrated course lists. These will have to be manually loaded into Jac.
• In the initial release, Future Students and Programs and Courses will continue to source their data in the same way as they are now (mainly through SI-net).
  • Programs, plans, courses, and shorter form credentials data will be mastered in Jac and sent to SI-net through integration.
  • Course lists will continue to be managed in SI-net as per the existing processes during the transition period.
  • The Program Rules PDFs will not be impacted by CEEP at this stage, so these will continue to be managed as per the existing processes.
• Integration with Single Sign-On, UQ email servers and Records Management (TRIM).

After go-live, there will be a transition period where the CEEP team will assist staff to move their program requirements for offerings from 2021 into Jac. During this period, CEEP plans to deliver additional integration to enable publishing this information from Jac into Future Students and Programs and Courses. Once complete, this will then replace the course lists in SI-net.

Teams

CEEP is sponsored by Professor Joanne Wright, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic).

Key project contacts

Steering committee