Curriculum Management Approval System goes live

ACU's new Curriculum Management Approval System (CMAS) is scheduled to go live tomorrow (19 November). From Friday, online course information pages and the handbook will be drawn directly from CMAS, which will be the single source of truth for all course and unit information – thereby enhancing our compliance around the integrity of this data.

CMAS is a significant project that has involved collaboration across the entire university to identify and streamline ageing and disparate manual processes. The resulting improvements will make it easier and more intuitive for prospective students navigating the course browser, and staff will find it easier to use the course approvals process and manage course information.

Led by Marketing and External Relations and Student Administration, the project team has worked with each of the faculties, the Learning and Teaching Centre, International and IT over two years to develop the new system.

The course pages have been significantly expanded and improved, with:

• a new visual design
• more comprehensive entry and pathway information for non-school leavers
• extended unit information, including generic unit outlines, with assessment and topics
• dedicated information pages for majors, minors, specialisations and sequences
• additional marketing information such as student testimonials, staff profiles and events.

The content of the handbook will remain essentially unchanged, but it has been given an updated look and feel.

Course Approval, Amendment, Review and Discontinuation (CAARD) process

From Monday 23 November, CMAS templates will be available to manage course approval, amendment, review and discontinuation processes. Any new course or unit approvals will be managed via CMAS from this date.

The existing Word templates can be used for the remainder of 2020 for changes that are already in progress, but any new or updated content to be published in the Handbook or on the course webpages will also need to be entered in CMAS.

From 4 January 2021, all CAARD processes, new or in progress, will be managed exclusively in CMAS.

Extensive training is available to all nominated school and faculty users.

Anticipated benefits

CMAS represents a dramatic improvement in the way that course and unit information is approved and managed at ACU. It will replace existing fragmented, error-prone manual processes with a single streamlined system, and it will deliver major benefits to both staff and students.

Students will have access to more detailed, accurate and consistent course and unit information, enabling them to make important decisions about their enrolment with greater confidence.

CMAS will save staff time currently spent not only approving and publishing course information, but also identifying, correcting and managing the consequences of the inevitable errors that result from our existing processes.

It will support faster, more responsive publication timelines, greater transparency of course approval processes, and improved compliance with the Higher Education Standards Framework.

What happens next?

The CMAS project team has worked tirelessly over the last year to bring this project to this point. As well as collaborating with the vendor to develop a suite of templates and workflows tailored to ACU’s needs, they have compiled, collated and cross-checked thousands of pieces of course and unit information from spreadsheets, Banner, SharePoint sites and Word documents across the university.

Given the magnitude of the task, it is inevitable that there will be some errors. If you identify any problems with course or unit information, please notify the relevant staff member for your Faculty.