After more than nine months of proposal, review, consideration and discussion, the contract for a curriculum management system has been awarded to Leepfrog Technologies Inc. and their system, CourseLeaf.
CourseLeaf will be used for course and curriculum proposal and maintenance, catalog management, learning outcome tracking and management, and the tracking of metrics required for accreditation. CourseLeaf will not be used to manage course content; course content will continue to be managed via our learning management system (LMS), Canvas.
Over the past ten months, significant work has been done by stakeholders across the university to understand our needs and to prepare for the implementation of a curriculum management system. Continue reading for more information about this decision.
About the Decision
The Student Information System (SIS) Project was launched in February 2019, as part of our campus Enterprise Systems Renewal (ESR) effort with the goal of implementing a comprehensive, modern solution to support academic and business transactions throughout a student’s academic lifecycle and to provide analytics to help improve the student experience and student educational outcomes. To accomplish this goal, the SIS Project will implement new systems and update existing systems, including a curriculum management system.
An RFP for a curriculum management system was opened at the end of July 2022. Vendors participating in the RFP submitted detailed proposals and then met with a scoring team composed of the SIS Project core team, key stakeholders from across the university and selected members of the project governance committee in conference room pilot (CRP) sessions. At these sessions, the vendors demonstrated how their systems executed UC San Diego processes related to course and curriculum proposal and maintenance, catalog management, and learning outcome tracking and management.
Following the CRP sessions, scores for each vendor were tabulated, which were then presented to project governance and the project sponsor, Executive Vice Chancellor Elizabeth H. Simmons. Based on the scores, Leepfrog Technologies and their system, CourseLeaf, was the clear winner. The project team and governance committee look forward to working with Leepfrog Technologies, the Academic Senate and the entire university community to implement CourseLeaf and improve our course-, curriculum- and catalog-related processes. CourseLeaf is also currently in use at UC Berkeley and UC Irvine.
Next Steps
The SIS Project core team is working closely with stakeholders to build an implementation team representative of the units most impacted by the project. The team is also in the process of gathering a steering committee to provide leadership to the project and an advisory committee composed of future end-users of the system to help guide design and implementation choices, all of which will operate under the guidance of the overall SIS Project governance committee.
In order to manage the impact of the project on stakeholders and minimize overlap with other ongoing and upcoming projects, the implementation of CourseLeaf will be divided into at least two phases over the next two years.
Project planning and execution of the first phase is currently expected to begin within the next two months, pending the readiness of the implementation team members to participate in the project. Go-live for the first phase of the project is currently targeted for 2024, and a more specific date for go-live will be shared with stakeholders and the university community once it has been determined.
The project executive sponsor, governance committee and core team thank the Academic Senate, the project stakeholders and the entire university community for their participation in and support of this project.
