Technology Advisory Group

The agenda for this Friday’s Faculty Senate meeting includes a discussion of the new online catalog – it seems that some faculty members and students have had difficulty using it.  If you have had or have heard about issues with the catalog, please drop us a comment or an email and let us know so we can get a sense of what’s going on and whether or not TAG should get involved. Thanks!

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Update 9/14-16: Here’s some of the reported feedback we’ve started to gather, related to the catalog itself as well as how it’s integrated into the University website.

• When you search the University’s website for information (such as faculty contact information), you keep getting directed to the catalog rather than a page (like the department’s home page) that actually has the information you need
• It’s hard to find a click path to get to a departmental website.  Most of the links that you’d think would take you to a departmental page actually take you to the program page in the catalog.  Or there just aren’t links to department pages where you’d expect them to be (e.g., there’s no easily findable way to click through to a CAS department’s page from the CAS home page).
• One of the faculty members involved in summer advising noted that the left hand menu in the catalog (its Table of Contents) is focused on PR needs as opposed to student needs (e.g., the first link is for Pride, Passion, Promise).  He further observed that the catalog information is very complete, but it’s not always intuitive to find – he had to call over to the PR office to figure out where to find the information he and his students needed.
• Not exactly a problem, but an odd design decision – the University directory at the end of the catalog is essentially useless.  This may just be a holdover from the print edition, but what’s the point of a directory that doesn’t give you any contact information? It would make sense for names of Faculty of Instruction to be linked to email addresses, while their department names should be linked to their department’s web site.

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Update 9/23: We got hold of the Undergraduate Catalog in PDF format.

In case you missed the announcement earlier this month, the University’s Undergraduate Catalog has been moved online and is now available as a searchable relational database (as opposed to last year’s PDF format) at catalog.scranton.edu. The catalog database also includes last year’s undergraduate catalog, graduate catalog, and student handbook.  (Don’t forget that previous catalogs, all the way back to 1926, can be found in the Library’s digital collections at www.scranton.edu/library/coursecatalogs).

According to the Public Relations office, there will be an information session on campus about the new catalog format at some point.  All content changes are expected to be completed by the time Orientation begins in July.

There will be a print version of the catalog available, but in limited quantities.

Comments or questions should be addressed to Gerry Zaboski at zaboskig1@scranton.edu.