Coursedog launches August 21

Coursedog—the integrated course and program approval workflow system replacing ECAS, PCAS, and University catalogs—will launch Monday, August 21. All previous users of ECAS and PCAS will automatically have equivalent access in Coursedog and individual invitations to required training have been sent to them. Any new access will need to be requested after Coursedog launches. Post-launch information on requesting access, completing training, and support contact information can be found at z.umn.edu/coursedog-support.

ECAS and PCAS will be available as view-only for several months as a historical reference.

In addition to changes in the curriculum management workflow, there will be significant changes to the University catalog and the links to individual programs. The main page for catalogs will remain catalogs.umn.edu, but users will select which campus they want to view. The links for each program within the catalog (starting with https:/onestop2.umn.edu/pcas) will be different. Any website currently pointing to an individual program page in the catalog will need to manually update them to the new link. More information about this is on the Coursedog Project webpage.

If you have questions, please direct them to coursedog@umn.edu.

Coursedog update

The Coursedog project is moving towards our August 21, 2023 launch date. Thank you to all of our fabulous project team members and stakeholders who have provided their time & expertise throughout the project. Without campus support, this transition from ECAS & PCAS to Coursedog would not be possible.

User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

This month, 18.5% of current ECAS & PCAS users in the University community participated in UAT testing to validate that the Coursedog system fulfills business requirements. These participants represented almost every TC college and each campus. A post-test survey found that Coursedog scored better or about the same as ECAS & PCAS in all of the following: look & feel, intuitiveness, accuracy, time/number of steps required to complete a task, and help functions.

Upcoming milestones

• Coursedog "freeze": June 2, 2023
• The project team will be locked out of the Coursedog system as they work to copy over our Coursedog testing environment configurations and settings to a new production environment.
• ECAS & PCAS “freeze”: July 8, 2023
• The data transfer between current systems and Coursedog begins. Extensive data validation is completed, and ECAS and PCAS users of all levels will no longer be able to make any changes in current systems.
• Coursedog Training Modules available: July 2023
• Coursedog training modules will become available in Training Hub starting the end of July 2023. Current ECAS & PCAS users will receive an email invite as soon as they are ready.
• Coursedog go-live: August 21, 2023
• Coursedog will become available to previous users of ECAS and PCAS at equivalent access roles.

More information, including a project timeline and sneak peak videos, are available on the Coursedog project page.

University catalog will transition to ASR

In the near future, ASR will assume responsibility for the maintenance and production of the University catalog--work previously done by University Relations--for all campuses (undergraduate and graduate). Tasks will include review and editing of course and curriculum information in central systems (i.e., ECAS and PCAS) and the creation of a bi-yearly printable version of the catalog. Questions about this transition can be directed to Tina Falkner or Ingrid Nuttall.

Reminder on graduate course approvals in ECAS

Several changes in the review, routing, and approval of 8xxx-level courses in ECAS have been made over the past two years as a result of the graduate education transition.

Effective July 2010, responsibility for reviewing and approving 8xxx-level courses (and select 5xxx-level courses in a handful of interdisciplinary graduate programs) was relocated to the colleges. The Graduate School was removed from the review and approval process for these courses.

Due to requirements of the Electronic Course Authorization System (ECAS), the Graduate School continued to pass courses through ECAS, but without review, following notification of college approval. Exempt from this change were the pre-thesis credit (8666), thesis credit (8777 and 8888), and "full-time equivalent" (8333 and 8444) registrations, which were to remain unchanged until decisions could be made about the future of these central graduate registrations.

Effective June 2011, college/dean-level approval for 8xxx-level courses (and some 5xxx-level courses in interdisciplinary graduate programs) was added to ECAS for colleges that had not previously been in the ECAS approval queue. As a result, ECAS now routes all 8xxx-level courses for college/dean-level approval before routing them to the Graduate School queue. Graduate School "approval" is still required by the ECAS system, and the Graduate School continues to submit the courses, without review, when the courses appear in its queue. The central graduate registrations remain exempt from modification, with one exception: The policy on credit requirements for master's and doctoral degrees allows programs to modify eligibility requirements for doctoral thesis credits (8888), with collegiate approval.

Programs and colleges are asked not to submit changes in the remaining central graduate registrations (courses numbered 8333, 8444, 8666, and 8777), pending decisions about these courses later this year.

If you have questions about this process, please contact the student records training & support team at srhelp@umn.edu or 612-625-2803.