Page Comparison

Disciplines are an extra metadata layer on top of (and outside of) Banner. They are named collections of course codes. For example there is a discipline called "Statistics" and its definition is:

• MATH 177
• MATH 277
• MATH 377
• STAT 101-399
• STAT 401-899
• STOR 690

The discipline list is used to populate the Course Finder subject browse—again, here's Statistics as an example.

The design intent for disciplines was that they provided a way to aggregate and name arbitrary collections of courses, with more flexibility than the Banner subject codes. (You'll see that Statistics as a discipline draws on three different subject codes, which Banner would not allow.)

So what are the problems with this approach?

1. The relationship between subjects and disciplines is not clearly defined. 
   1. Many disciplines correspond to the Calendar definition of what is required to major in a subject, but many don't. 
   2. Similarly many others correspond to a subject page, but many others don't. (For example: we have both "Statistics" and "Statistics and Operations Research". What's the difference? Nobody knows. How did they get like that? Nobody knows.) 
   3. Even when they do match up with the data model, it's often extremely counterintuitive—for example, the discipline “Music” lists the courses that are approved for the BA major in Music,not the Bachelor of Music.
2. There is no clear model for what level of information disciplines should be providing. Some are very broad. Some are very narrow. This is further complicated by the lack of clarity around how they relate to subjects.
3. Nobody is certain whose job it is to keep these up to date—Course Administration? Marketing? Web? Schools?
4. It sits outside Banner and very few people are aware where these definitions live.

These are all problems of implementation rather than principle—we could make good use of the tool but we have not done the thinking and stakeholder management that would be required.