Curriculum

Overview

Student Curriculum reporting - an Operational Excellence project - creates Cal Answers decision support helping to inform and transform the way UC Berkeley analyzes, supports, communicates, and plans our curriculum. 

The project aids numerous constituencies:

  • Departments will be able to provide better access to critical courses, thereby facilitating time to degree and reducing student frustration.
  • Advisors will be able to better support students by integrating information on enrollment patterns, current course availability, degree requirements, and student course history.
  • Deans and Chairs will be better enabled to review curricular needs, evaluate their instructional staffing strategy, and consider other options on mounting the curriculum. 
  • Campus leadership will be able to better access information on how enrollment patterns impact course enrollments, offerings, and demand.

Providing insight to critical campus goals

  • Are students able to get the courses they need? We will be able to more accurately plan for and prevent bottlenecks to students’ progress. We can address prevalent myths about students being unable to graduate in a timely manner because of cutbacks – myths that can impact our ability to recruit the best new students.
 
  • What populations are particular courses and programs serving? With access to information on the kind of students taking particular courses, we can see trends, be better able to be more proactive in planning the curriculum, and model increases to enrollments when creating a new program. 

  • How are investments in common good curriculum impacting students? Currently, tracking common good performance is an extremely time consuming and manual process for staff across many units. With Cal Answers we can create and easily update a public dashboard that will save a great deal of time, demonstrate the impact of our investments, and open the possibility of expanding this type of review to other curricular investments. 

  • How can we plan the curriculum to optimize financial and space resources along with student needs? The new budget process is transformational in allowing units to build a comprehensive view of their resources. 
Units need to understand the impact of investing resources in different ways (e.g. course offerings, staff hiring, classroom and labs) and a course dashboard could highlight key metrics for use the budget process. 

  • How do grading patterns impact student choices and opinions? External for-profit entities such as MyEdu gather course grade data to feed their private website tools to help students make better decisions. With Cal Answers Berkeley will be able to make that information available to provide valuable insight in student course selection, allow feedback to instructors for better grade consistency, and offer insight into individual course evaluations.

Dashboards

Departmental Curriculum Profile

Review curriculum-related metrics for each academic unit to assist with curriculum management as well as academic planning

  • Is my department offering more course sections now compared to five years ago? 
  • Has the average class size remained steady? 
  • Do courses in my department have a high percentage of enrollments by non-majors?
  • Which courses from other departments do my majors take?

Curriculum Long-Term Planning

Review course offerings and enrollments over time

  • Is the enrollment growth I am seeing in my courses significant?
  • How has the demand for this course changed over time?

Weekly Enrollment Management

Track how your courses are filling week-to-week, from registration through add/drop

  • Have we offered enough sections to meet the demand for this course?
  • What does the waitlist for my course look like at this week of the registration period?
  • How does this compare to the same week the year before?

Course Grade Distribution

Track both average course grades and letter grade distributions

  • What is the letter grade distribution for the class I am teaching?
  • How does it compare to the distribution and the average for the course or the department?
  • Has it changed over time?

Students & Courses

Learn more about which students are in your courses and what courses your students are taking

  • What percent of the students taking this course are from majors outside of the department?
  • Which courses do Applied Mathematics majors take?

Teaching Activity

Teaching Activity by Instructor Type report
Shows course enrollments and student credit hours by the type of instructor teaching the course. Answers the question: Which types of courses have been taught by which types of instructors?  

Instructor List by Course report
Provides a list of instructors who have taught or who are associated with a course. Answers the question: Who has taught this course in recent years?

Course List by Instructor report 
Offers a list of courses taught by an instructor with indicators showing if the courses were team-taught and/or cross-listed. Answers the question: Which courses has a specific instructor taught in recent years?

Departmental Teaching Workload

Teaching by Credited Department
This report tells you how much teaching activity an academic unit received credit for by the type of instructor teaching.

Course Detail by Credited Department
This report tells you, for an instructor that was actively teaching in a given semester, to what academic department their classes, class enrollments and student credit hours were credited. 

Room Share and Consolidated Course Detail
This report allows you to look up an officially crosslisted or roomshared course to see the full information for the class listings in the bundle. To identify listings in a roomshare bundle, Cal Answers checks each course section to identify if it is occurring at the same place, day and time as another course section.