Solving Data Tracking and Consistency Issues with CourseLeaf

"Faculty at Georgian have appreciated how CIM provides one source of truth for course and program curriculum, as well as transparency with regard to changes and approval of those changes."

- Sara Barnes, Academic Quality Lead, Office of Academic Quality at Georgian College

Georgian College, a leader in co-operative education, is a mid-sized community college located in the heart of Ontario, Canada. With approximately 10,000 students at seven campus locations, the school offers a wide variety of educational paths and a broad array of fields of study leading to one-year certificates as well as two- and three-year diplomas, four-year honours degrees, and graduate certificates. 

Georgian’s vision as a pioneer in education is to “accelerate success through exceptional teaching and learning, innovation and partnerships.” One way Georgian sought to achieve its vision was by improving its paper-and-email-based system for course proposals, edits, and approvals. In particular, Georgian wanted to solve the challenges of data tracking and data inconsistency. 

"CourseLeaf provided a robust solution that could be customized to meet our needs." - Bonnie Lee Clarke, recently retired Curriculum Support Specialist

“Primarily, we were looking for an automated system that would track changes to program and course submissions, provide one source for all documents to be created and maintained, provide transparency for the institution and external curriculum approval bodies, and automate approval processes,” said Bonnie Lee Clarke, recently retired Curriculum Support Specialist.

With these goals in mind, Georgian’s curriculum staff reached out to peer institutions to learn what worked for them, and whether those solutions would work at Georgian. 

An exploratory teleconference with a group of CourseLeaf clients first brought CourseLeaf to the Georgian team’s attention. It quickly became clear that CourseLeaf could provide Georgian with the solution it was searching for.

“CourseLeaf provided a robust solution that could be customized to meet our needs, providing the flexibility to address changing institutional requirements as well as the desired transparency of submissions and automated approvals,” said Clarke. 

"Faculty at Georgian have appreciated how CIM provides one source of truth for course and program curriculum, as well as transparency with regard to changes and approval of those changes. Further, the CIM workflow facilitates collaboration, bringing faculty and program administrators in contact with the right people at the right time in the development of a new course, program, or in proposing a prospective change.” - Sara Barnes, Academic Quality Lead, Office of Academic Quality

Georgian began working closely with CourseLeaf to transition its existing course and program offerings into CourseLeaf Catalog (CAT) and CourseLeaf Curriculum (CIM), while converting manual processes to dynamic, online management systems featuring easy data entry and editing capabilities.

“Since moving to CourseLeaf, it’s been easy to track where a course or program is in the edit or approval cycle. It’s also allowed us to refine and streamline processes as changes arise and have those processes be transparent to users,” said Clarke. “CAT’s color-coded version-tracking, for instance, makes it easy to identify what has been changed, and who made the changes.”

Even implementing CourseLeaf was easy. “The team at CourseLeaf was very responsive to our needs throughout the implementation of CIM and CAT,” said Clarke. “Our questions were answered quickly, and forms were customized to meet our needs as promised. The ongoing support made our transition to CourseLeaf painless and has allowed us to adapt in a quickly changing environment. It has also given us confidence that the adoption of new modules, such as Learning Outcomes and Syllabi, will also be positive experiences.”

“We would recommend—and we have recommended—CourseLeaf to other institutions,” Clarke said. “We are happy to do this because of the positive experience we had with implementation, the support we’ve had post-implementation, the system’s ability to track changes, the transparency of workflow, the ease of making changes ourselves, and our ability to add users and roles ourselves without needing to reach out to CourseLeaf support.”