The University of Texas at Austin
Degree Audit User Group
Monday, August 10, 20
Meeting Minutes
Attendance
Present: Justin Brady, Mickey Gonzales, Noe Gonzales, Kate, Joly, Daniela Kaufman, Delisa Lee, Jen Morgan, Xavier Oaks, Brooke Rich, Vasanth Srinivasa, Jesse Stumbris, Kim Taylor, Catherine Theriot, Jesse Weeks, Catherine Whited, Tomi Yamamoto
Notes/Action Items
Topic Title Inventory: The Topic Title Inventory is a web-based interface that allows users to search and view topic titles. It allows you to view a primary course key’s usage history, view the number of times a title has been offered, and first time CCYYS and unique.
There are three types of titles in the Topic Title Inventory:
- Standard unnumbered topics: These are your standard topics courses with the topics switch set in the course inventory and the topic number is zero.
- Faux unnumbered topics: These topics do not have the topics switch set in the course inventory, but have some sort of variation on the degree plan statement. (Ex: May be taken twice with the consent of the instructor.)
- Numbered topics: The topics switch is set in the course inventory and the topic number is 1 or greater.
How Title Groupings Are Used: Courses with similar titles are grouped together on a separate file to know programmatically that the titles are related. Getting title variation for courses with the same field of study is the only time the core processor looks at title groupings, but it skips a grouping if the fields of study are different.
IDA 2.0 checks course relations first for courses that have different fields of study. The course relations shown on the title history page are all bound by semester in that it's showing the relations that exist for that course for each specific section/semester that it was offered.
Replacement relations are not time bound and will display on the title history page once the relation is created. Duplicate and schedule same-as relations are time bound and will only display the semester of the effective date in NRRELS and later.
Topic Title Inventory groupings allows unnumbered grouped titles with the same FOS to appear as aliases on an audit, and all of the PCKs in a title grouping are essentially considered equal for this purpose. The PCK is a unique identifier that explicitly identifies a course. Courses that are grouped with different fields of study will not show as aliases in the degree audit.
Numbered and unnumbered topics will not be grouped together. However, when a user selects a title and goes to the title groupings page, the groupings will display any related numbered and unnumbered topics in CCYYS first offered order, oldest to newest.
Search Options:
- By title
- By FOS, course number, and topic number if it is a numbered topic.
- By primary course key
The data you see from the results page is a display of the offering history for that specific primary course key. It is created on the fly from the Course Schedule file and is therefore not modifiable from the Topic Title Inventory. Due to data limitations, it only displays as far back as 1994.
Topic Load:
Once the course schedule is finalized, the tech team will run a job to load all the new unnumbered topic titles in the Topic Title inventory and attempt to group titles with like titles.
The numbered topic load is run once a semester and loaded from the course inventory.
Room-shares, graduate and undergraduate courses, and numbered topics should not be grouped. Numbered topics are in the title inventory for display purposes only.
IDA 2.0 and the Topic Title Inventory: IDA 2.0 uses the Topic Title Inventory in two ways:
- When you create a course list, you can select title variations for standard and faux unnumbered topics using the title picker.
- When running audits for students, the core processor looks at title groups to identify related titles in the same FOS.
Link: http://registrar.utexas.edu/docs/ida/title-inventory-pres.pdf
Next Steps
Next Meeting: September 3, 2015