Staff recognition

A huge kudos to our ASR staff who have been working on the Coursedog project for the last two years. The new Coursedog curriculum and catalog tools launched this Monday, August 21. Congratulations to the team on reaching this HUGE milestone!

The launch of Coursedog marks a transition for our University curriculum staff from ECAS & PCAS to a single Software as a Service (SaaS) system that integrates course and program approval workflows and increases process transparency. Coursedog also feeds both course & program data into a University Catalog website that is more user-friendly and accessible for all students.

It took a lot of people to make this project possible, and a sincere thank you goes to everyone who contributed to its success. Special thanks to the following ASR staff members who helped with the Coursedog Project: Allie Cummelin, Annalee Tomsicek, Christina Herold, Christopher Abts, Christopher Smith, Dan Delaney, Danielle Eberhard, David Norman, Frank Morello, Heather Micek, Ingrid Nuttall, Jennifer Peterson, Jennifer Selander, Jessica Clem, Kate Sophia, Kathryn J. Kvam, Matt Plachejo, Max Herman, Renae Faunce, and Sara Cokl.

Several project team members will continue supporting users and ongoing development of the Coursedog product post go-live. Special shout-out to Matt Plachejo who has taken on the role of Coursedog Product Owner. Matt will continue to work with the Curriculum Administration Best Practices governance group to implement University curriculum administration decisions into the tool and provide the University community with ongoing product feature updates.

Coursedog launches August 21

Coursedog—the integrated course and program approval workflow system replacing ECAS, PCAS, and University catalogs—will launch Monday, August 21! All previous users of ECAS and PCAS will automatically have equivalent access in Coursedog. Post-launch information on requesting access, completing training, and support contact information can be found at z.umn.edu/coursedog-support.

ECAS and PCAS will be available as view-only for several months as a historical reference.

This launch is the culmination of more than a year of work involving curriculum management representatives systemwide. More information about this is on the Coursedog Project webpage. Project manager Sara Cokl also presented on this project and the future of ASR projects at this morning’s ASR Staff Assembly. A recording of that presentation will be available soon in the ASR All-Staff Assemblies Google folder.

If you have questions, please direct them to coursedog@umn.edu.

ASR Operations and Strategic Initiatives

• Project management for the Coursedog & Chatbot projects are in-progress. 
• Coursedog will be beginning user acceptance testing next week. 
• Chatbot implementation by the vendor is complete and we will kick-off the ASR portion of the project on May 16th.
• Training courses are being developed for Coursedog authors and approvers.
• The OSI Project Team is providing some oversight and guidance for WorkflowGen process transitions. For more information, see the WFG Retirement Transition Guide.
• A new work intake and prioritization process for Jadu e-forms and workflow work is in development.
• We’ve been working with OSF to review, update, and test financial aid communications for the 23-24 aid year.
• We finished creating the 2022 ASR Annual Report, which includes profiles for each unit and additional information about ASR’s organizational structure, technology, budget/ROI, and ASR and MPACT.
• We’ve established a monthly writer working group meeting for the content writers across all campuses. These meetings are a great opportunity for writers to hear about new initiatives, upcoming projects, and to share resources. 
• We are also creating an internal content maintenance calendar that will live on the content management website. This document will help align all writers on content-specific dates, reminders, and deadlines. 
• The development of a new content strategy training presentation is underway. Geared toward new hires, this presentation will examine the importance of our content strategy, and why it should be at the forefront of our content decisions.

Coursedog update: Timeline adjustment

The project team is currently completing Quality Assurance (QA) testing for configuration and data integrations into the Coursedog curriculum and catalog products. While our QA testing is almost complete, the team encountered more issues than initially expected. As a result, we’ll need more time to resolve the issues, and the go-live date will need to be adjusted. Coursedog will now go live at the end of August 2023 (originally June 2023).

The team’s primary goal is to ensure that the Coursedog product is of the highest possible quality for University staff at go-live. The additional 8 weeks of time will allow the team to deliver a best-quality product for users participating in User Acceptance Testing in May 2023. This will result in a better product at launch in August. Over the next week, communications regarding this change will be sent to current ECAS & PCAS users and additional stakeholders.