Subjects and the relationship to courses, programmes and schools

Owned by Paul Seiler (Unlicensed)
Last updated: May 05, 2015 by Keith Bolland (Unlicensed)Version comment
3 min read

In thinking about how the analysis of subjects might apply to the content outline (and example subject page when I see it) I realised a need to write up our questions and record our conversation as we think about and lead towards a subject page proposal (which would probably be in the "Design" section of Confluence). 

 

Related subjects

  • Useful, but casts the net wide.
  • Not universally used 
  • Currently maintained by schools. Would we now get this from them and maintain it centrally?
  • Or do we want to use a recommendation engine instead?

Relationship with course

  • Developing a mapping will be challenging, unless we base it from the subject codes used (in Banner) as the first part of the course code
  • Would this be best done with a contextual search widget (i.e. a version of course finder)? Would pick up any "known" settings (e.g. UG or PG, subject) and return a list of relevant courses. 
  • Not on current subject page. Is it required going forward?
Disciplines

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.

Relationship with school

  • Usually only a link to the "taught by: school
  • I have only seen singular, but maybe there are some other (e.g. double) school relationships
  • Do we need to better understand the approval proces or threshold for a new subject (to ensure new subject pages are created as required)?
  • How do we best balance the school cf faculty relationship? Or is it okay as is?

Relationship with programme/qualification

  • Usually only a mention of the programmes that apply, not even always hyper linked.
  • Quickly gets in to programme business rules, usually assuming the subject is to be a major.

Searching for subjects

  • Using the one field “synonym” for alternative search terms, whether they be an acronym, an abbreviation, a subject code from Banner, etc)
  • Will need a “level” attribute to hold if it is available at UG, PG or both