San Antonio, TX 78204-1429
www.alamo.edu/


Challenge

In 2008, Alamo Colleges, a group of five separate colleges in the San Antonio, Texas area, chose to move away from print, and toward online academic catalogs to reduce print costs. Concurrently, the Board of Trustees mandated common course descriptions for all five colleges, while recognizing the importance of permitting each college to retain its distinct identity, and unique degree plans. The evaluation team, that was already evaluating solutions to move to an e-catalog model, shifted priorities to include a requirement to support common courses. The goal was to obtain a solution that would permit management of courses at the district level, and yet still permit the individual colleges to maintain and control college-specific content and publish separate, branded e-catalogs.


Solution

As part of the evaluation process, vendors were approached with the challenge of supporting a common set of course descriptions across the multiple, uniquely branded catalogs for the five colleges. It would be necessary to also provide an administrative system to support both system-level editors, and college level editors. Digital Architecture was the only vendor already starting work on a software architecture to support the system objectives. After further discussions, Alamo Colleges contracted with Digital Architecture to provide the solution. The company worked closely with the college over the course of several months to perfect a solution that would meet all requirements, and the project was wrapped up in early 2009. With the help of the new software, Alamo Colleges met an aggressive deadline to transition content, train end-users, manage the administrative tasks associated with moving to a common course model, and publish all five e-catalogs.

Currently, Alamo Colleges uses a small number of super-users at the system level to manage content and a single college-level admin user with many editor accounts. A single course database is maintained and shared so that courses remain consistent and locked from editing at the college level. Each college has a different subset of courses, so they also have the ability to toggle courses "active" or "inactive". The same approach is taken with shared core curricula. The colleges create degree plans, add non-editable common core curricula, and build the remaining requirements using shared courses. The shared core curricula display only college offerings.

Feedback from faculty, students and advisers cite accessibility, usability and search capability as keys to the success of the e-catalog system, which is powered by the Acalog Enterprise Edition. The powerful search feature is described as "invaluable". Consistent formatting allows students to easily navigate between the various e-catalogs. An added feature is MyCatalog, where a student can create a personalized account and save information in which they are most interested.

The e-catalog system has also vastly improved curriculum management by enabling cross-college discipline teams to quickly identify which colleges offer a given course, and where that course is used in degree plans or as a pre-requisite to other courses. As a result, it is now easy to identify potential "ripple effects" when modifying courses.


The e-catalog has allowed Alamo Colleges to completely re-engineer the curriculum process using a systems approach that honors faculty-driven changes, and integrates the colleges' curriculum processes with a new district-wide process. Forward-thinking institutions looking to follow a similar path have a unique opportunity to re-examine processes across the board: everything from reducing the number of printed catalogs or ceasing to print altogether, to evaluating the possibility of systems consolidation in areas related to catalog content.

—Christa Emig, Ed.D.
Interim District Director of Curriculum
Coordination & Transfer Articulation