Comments on My tenuous relationship with online course catalogs

• Posted by Jennifer on September 23, 2010 at 9:30am EDT

• Agreed! I'd also add search capability in terms of how the courses relate to academic programs - thus, you'd be able to search for a general education literature course, or an upper level requirement for your Psychology major. I've seen many PDFs, but many campuses are now using software like PeopleSoft, so it seems the technology is very limited.

• keep the PDF as an option
• Posted by Dr. Pepper , Academic-in-Training on September 23, 2010 at 11:30am EDT

• As someone who is looking at PhD programs at a variety of different school I agree whole-heartedly with you! If it's on the web do include:

  * Past Syllabi

  * Professor Bios

  * Some sample lectures (if you have them) - maybe connect to your OCW

  * Show visual relationships between courses and their pre-requisites (I've this on my own anyway as I designed a curriculum plan for myself during my Master's level studies - but it's nice to have a CG option!

  The one thing I disagree with is the lack of PDF - Making the PDF the only option is silly, removing it completely is equally silly. I'd like to have something that is accessible when I don't have an internet connection when I want to look something up and I don't want to go through page after page after page of settings, dials, and dropdowns to get what I want :-)

• Sad but true
• Posted by Kevin R. Guidry , PhD Student at Indiana University on September 23, 2010 at 11:30am EDT

• I assume that we are underestimating the complexity of these systems because searching for and signing up for courses each semester is the most painful and convoluted thing I have done at each institution I have attended. I also caution against moving completely away from older technologies (paper, pdf) to newer ones (AJAX) because these listings must be available to every single student without them having to jump through many hoops. In fact, the most intuitive and effective system I've used was an older text-based system to which we had to telnet using terminal software.
  

• Posted by Dennis on September 23, 2010 at 12:30pm EDT

• Eric, do you think have embedded video is a good idea, or does it slow down load times too much? What if it's just linked, or opens in a new window/tab?

• Yes! Please!
• Posted by Lex , Director of External Relations at Greensboro College on September 23, 2010 at 2:45pm EDT

• As the guy responsible for Web content (and much else besides) at a small, independent college, I could not agree more with the need for such a resource. And would I be greedy if I asked for it in the form of freeware?

  Currently, we're using links to particular pages in an online *.pdf document for course catalogs. That gives us the ability to link from a department's landing page to that department's course listings in the catalog. But the format isn't very flexible, and even the page-linking feature works only on PCs, not Macs.

  That option, bad as it was, was the least bad of a limited range of bad options. If I had the first bit of programming skill, I'd try to develop something myself.

• Posted by Greg on September 23, 2010 at 6:00pm EDT

• My "dream" course catalog would include the following features: ACCESSIBLE

  Hi Eric, if you cannot make your "dream" accessible to the Deaf and Blind, and other disabilities, then you might as well leave it as a dream. It is the Law!

  Greg

• online catalogue
• Posted by paul weller , consultant at various on September 24, 2010 at 5:30am EDT

• Hi Eric,

  Hesitate to add to the wish list about being Google friendly/searchable, allowing interactivity with the website, video links etc! But, I do consultancy with a bunch of young whizkids who have evolved a version of the e-brochure (click and turn the page) that IS seen/read by Google et al, has an internal search engine ('find me a chemistry degree') and can provide nav links to the institution site on any content (videos, accommodation, fees, faculty, lecture notes etc). It seems to be limited by client imagination and can even be used to manage your seo.

  You can have a look at a base version they did for a Russell Group (Research rated) British university at:

  www.dundee.ac.uk/undergraduate/prospectus

  Be interested to hear what you and others think.

  Paul

• Posted by Lt. Uhura , Dundee's Online Catalog on September 24, 2010 at 8:15am EDT

• Yes, @paul weller, that is indeed a beautiful thing, Flash, a bit slow, probably because it is ahead of its time.

• We're working on it
• Posted by Julie Coates , V.P. for Information Services at LERN on September 24, 2010 at 12:30pm EDT

• LERN has developed digital brochure software that incorporates almost all the wish list mentioned here. We will be premiering it at our annual conference in Chicigo on November 6-8. It will be available free to LERN members.

• Good Online Catalog
• Posted by Sean , Asst. Dir. Marketing & Outreach at Shoreline Community College on September 24, 2010 at 5:45pm EDT

• How about this one? Seems like a nice example:

  http://www.greenriver.edu/catalog/contact/index.shtm

  Distinguished yet complimenting their main site; easy to navigate...

• Archiving
• Posted by Mikaila , Assistant Professor at Rhode Island College on September 26, 2010 at 5:00am EDT

• Those big giant PDFs actually have a purpose besides printing--they get archived by CollegeSource (a web-based database of college catalogs) and hopefully by your institutional archives as well. Maintaining these resources over time is of vital importance for several reasons, including evaluating transcripts of students who transfer many years after beginning their education and allowing curriculum researchers like myself to study to changes and evolutions of college curricula. Of course, it is possible to design systems that would allow more dynamic web-based catalogs to be archived in a platform-agnostic and durable fashion, but don't forget the importance of archiving as you imagine your dream catalog system.

• Open the Data; let the pros (Students) take over
• Posted by Nathan Vexler , uGrad Eng/Student Tech Advisory Committee at University of Waterloo on September 28, 2010 at 2:00pm EDT

• I think the best idea is to open up the data in raw form and let the pros (students) take over. Reliable, updated, official open data makes it easy for student developers to make mashups. Here at University of Waterloo, a few students have screen-scraped the Undergraduate Calendar and made such applications such as http://www.uwlive.ca/courselect/ and http://www.coursequalifier.com/. However, if campuses opened up the data, then they wouldn't have to spend 20-30% of their work screen scraping.

  Nate

• Decent catalog, but open data would be best
• Posted by Dallen Rose at Washington State University on September 30, 2010 at 1:30pm EDT

• Hmmm... Not impressed with any of the college catalog examples so far (though they do look nice, which is a start). No matter how good it looks, anything that dumps me into a PDF or a Flash flipbook is going to generate nothing but stress.

  Here's another sample for you: http://www.catalog.wsu.edu/Pullman/Academics
  
  It's almost entirely database-driven and incorporates the basic look of Washington State University. And I'd say it's *almost* the kind of thing you're looking for...but it still, at least in my opinion, not as easy to use or as useful as it ought to be. (Full disclosure: I work on web content for WSU, though I have nothing to do w/the catalog.)

  The best idea I've heard yet is Nathan Vexler's comment about making the data available for student developers to use. That made me think a little. Student developers often know their programming better than the university employees, and they ought to know how to present and organize the data for student consumption better than anyone else, because they *are* the students that use it. In these days when all sorts of huge community/social enterprises offer APIs for nearly anyone to build on, there has to be a way for colleges both to keep their core data secure and to make it freely available to "outside" people who have the ability to build something around it.