Journeys

Beyond tips and screens and advice, these are some of the broad, complex metaprojects I’ve undertaken. Describing any one of these without describing all of them is nearly impossible, but hypertext may help…a bit. All of these are works in progress, and may never be finished.

Before you begin on your own journey, I recommend a few documents: the Colleague users’ manuals for “Using Curriculum Management” and “Using Degree Audit.” I’m linking to publicly available versions of these documents but those links may be unreliable. Neither of these are easy reading, but they contain strange and magical secrets available only to those few who’ve RTFM.

Secondly, all of my work hinges on Entrinsik Informer. This is a reasonably user-friendly reporting/visualizing software package that works specifically with Ellucian products. It’s powerful and simple and I’m using an out-of-date version of it. It takes some work for IT to integrate Informer with all the modules, tables, and files contained in Colleague, and they will probably be selective in their additions to the program rather than throwing everything open, or opening the software to all users. But it’s a clean and powerful way to query and transform data. I live in terror of the day that we move to another data system.

Student Program Finder: How to find the students that were never added to a program?

Project Auto Grad: Developing a near-graduation finder and a two-hour graduation process

Degree Health: Cleaning up awards and reducing reliance on substitutions and exceptions

HB8 Tracking: Identifying, tagging, and reporting on HB8 projects (A Greek drama with a large cast of characters)