Empowering Faculty for Success at Illinois Central College with Curricular Transformation

The Challenge

Outdated Curriculum Processes Slowed Faculty and Committee Operations

Before implementing Coursedog, Illinois Central College (ICC) relied on cumbersome, manual workflows for managing curriculum updates. Faculty and staff faced lengthy approval processes, that caused delays and administrative bottlenecks. Instead of focusing on meaningful curriculum improvements, faculty often spent valuable time correcting minor grammatical errors, resulting in inefficiencies, wasted effort, and growing frustration.

"We used to have 2- 4 hour long curriculum committee meetings dedicated to reviewing the curriculum and taking time to edit any grammatical errors. Since implementing Coursedog, our meetings finish within the timeframe we want and focus on the actual curriculum content. With Coursedog, we're able to have the faculty submit their curriculum for a proposal and have committee members look at them ahead of time, review the proposal and make their comments, which ends up saving us about 8 hours per semester. The process has improved efficiency, saved time, lessened errors, and made the Curriculum Committee process more pleasant.” - Stacy Gehrig, Dean, Curriculum and Scheduling

Lack of a Unified Catalog Created Barriers for Student Accessibility

ICC historically posted its catalog online as a PDF, requiring a separate file for every update. This process made it difficult for students to find and understand important information, creating confusion and unnecessary complexity. Without a unified catalog, students struggled to access accurate course listings, degree requirements, or institutional regulations. This lack of clarity often led to misunderstandings, limiting their ability to make informed academic decisions and ultimately impacting their success.

“It was difficult to assume our students would look for an addendum for a new program or an updated course in separate PDF files online. Now, we just have a page that refers to all of our additions on a certain date so we have one source for our catalog.” - Stacy Gehrig, Dean, Curriculum and Scheduling

Data Inconsistencies Between the Curriculum & Catalog

Without an integrated system, ICC faced data inconsistencies between its curriculum and catalog. Faculty, staff, and students struggled with outdated information, leading to errors and misalignment across departments. These inefficiencies not only increased the manual workload for faculty but also jeopardized students’ ability to stay on track for graduation.

“In the past, ICC used a home-grown data storage database system which had several shortcomings. For example, sometimes an update to a field could be forgotten which then caused problems with a student and a transcript. We kept finding things that didn’t get updated from years ago. Now, everything seamlessly pushes from Coursedog to PeopleSoft and back.” - Stacy Gehrig, Dean, Curriculum and Scheduling

The Solution

Real-Time Catalog Updates Improve Student Accessibility

Coursedog's dynamic catalog ensures that students always have access to the most up-to-date course offerings and descriptions. Updates are applied using the effective dates, eliminating the need for PDF addendums and manual cross-referencing. ICC has shifted from static PDFs to a searchable, student-friendly interface, improving accessibility and engagement.

“It was very hard to find what you were looking for in our previous catalog set up. Now, we have the ability for students, advisors and staff to use the catalog and have a search mechanism. This aspect is one of the biggest benefits in regards to our students and using the catalog at Illinois Central." - Stacy Gehrig, Dean, Curriculum and Scheduling

Coursedog's streamlined curriculum and catalog management also empowers faculty and staff to keep content updated effortlessly. Custom fields and delegated page ownership ensure efficient updates, creating a more dynamic and accessible catalog  for students.

“The ability to add custom fields in Curriculum Management that then can be pulled into the catalog now provides added fields for stakeholder search abilities. ICC now delegates catalog and student handbook page ownership to other Divisions at the college for editing within Catalog Management. Since the adoption of Catalog Management, the college can easily update the catalog to reflect curricular updates and/or policy changes instead of having a separate PDF Addendum document on the college website.” - Stacy Gehrig, Dean, Curriculum and Scheduling

Seamless SIS Integration Improves Data Integrity

With real-time data synchronization between Coursedog and PeopleSoft, ICC has drastically reduced administrative errors and ensured consistent, up-to-date information across its systems. Faculty members can now dedicate their time to enhancing the learning experience and supporting student success, rather than wasting resources correcting grammatical errors.

“The Coursedog integration with PeopleSoft has been a blessing because it has decreased 65% of grammatical and general errors in how we manage our data. Due to the PeopleSoft integration, we find that we don't have the number of errors that we once had and it makes a lot of our processes run more efficiently. ” - Stacy Gehrig, Dean, Curriculum and Scheduling

Faculty-Friendly Interface Drives Adoption and Elevates Culture

Coursedog’s intuitive interface and user-friendly workflows have led to quick adoption among faculty and staff. Unlike previous systems, Coursedog required minimal training, enabling users to seamlessly transition to its platform for approvals and revisions. Using Coursedog, faculty is able to spend their time creating innovative Curriculums for student engagement.

“The culture has improved with our faculty since implementation.  They embraced using Coursedog for their curriculum. It was very tedious to look at course and program proposal revisions using our homegrown system. Now, when a new faculty member decides to do a program revision, all they have to do is log on and follow the prompts. Coursedog has also saved us a lot of time by not having to hold a lot of tutorials or videos to teach our faculty/staff how to submit their curriculum. We have noticed how much happier faculty are when they realize how easy Coursedog makes this process.” - Stacy Gehrig, Dean, Curriculum and Scheduling

Looking Ahead

Supporting ICC’s Institutional Strategy with Custom Fields

ICC leverages Coursedog’s custom field features to monitor key initiatives like low-cost textbook usage and eight-week course offerings. This helps ICC make data-driven strategic decisions to enhance student support programs and achieve their yearly initiatives.

“Coursedog has helped in regards to helping us with our strategic plans by creating custom fields that we're able to track. For example, we’re able to track courses that have no textbook costs which is a huge initiative at our college right now and we're also able to create custom fields in regards to what courses have been offered as an eight-week option. We plan to move 65-70% of our courses to 8- weeks long. We can pull this data and start to make changes to help us create strategic plans to reach these goals.”  - Stacy Gehrig, Dean, Curriculum and Scheduling

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