The General Announcements represents Rice's official curriculum. Before each academic year, before the GA is published, academic departments and programs are asked to review their curricular listings in the GA to ensure that their information and requirements are current and up to date.
Rice is in the process of implementing CourseLeaf CAT, which is a comprehensive Catalog Management System that is designed to assist schools in maintaining the university curricular requirements and policies in an interactive format. CAT will be used to publish the 2017-2018 GA.
Similar to last year, the Office of the Registrar (OTR) will facilitate the edit process to the curricular program listings for the 2017-2018 GA. This process includes edits and updates made in the “Programs of Study” section of the online GA. The VPAA has distributed the 2017-2018 Programs of Study Edit Process memo regarding an overview of the process, key dates for each round of edits, and additional helpful information regarding this year's GA publishing procedures. This is also available on their website under the Guidebook section.
Over the past several months, the Office of the Registrar has worked on the GA text before the edit rounds began to further bring consistency in the display of program requirements. You will see updates made to curricular headings, and more definition brought to the courses required for the degree/major as well as requirements for the curricular components within a major (or minor or certificate).
Additionally, you will see new tabs for each program: Policies and Opportunities. We have moved any existing content into those tabs as appropriate, but you are encouraged to add additional content to these areas to further identify program policies and opportunities for students. If you need assistance with this, OTR can provide examples.
Each department will be emailed a link to their unique GA text at the beginning of each round. Should departments need to find these URLs to check the progress of their GA edits at any time, they can find them listed by department here once the staging area is ready for that department. (Login using your NetID is required.)
On your behalf, the OTR will make all updates to each department or program's GA text in the system. We ask that, during each round of edits, each department or program thoroughly read, review, and comment where appropriate on the following areas in their unique Programs of Study page:
From the Undergaduate or Graduate tabs, the list of programs offered by the department or program will appear. Clicking on an individual program will list the requirements for that academic program.
There is a course in a requirements grid that doesn't have a URL to click for the description, and the title is not listed. Why?
This indicates that the course is currently not active for the academic year which you are reviewing the GA for. It should either be removed from the list of courses that fulfill that requirement or should be requested to be re-activated through the New Course Request Process.
I would like to edit the title for a course listed in my requirements. How do I do this?
The information for the courses listed in the requirements are being pulled in through the 2017-2018 Course Catalog. Should you want to change this information, please follow the Course Revision process guidelines. If you want to add additional details regarding a course, we can do so by indicating a “footnote and additional information.”
This year’s review and approval of department and program curricular requirements will additionally serve as “sign-off” on corresponding Degree Works scribe for all academic programs that use Degree Works (which includes all undergraduate programs of study, all graduate certificates, and select master’s degree programs). Because the curricular requirements documented in the GA are official curriculum, Degree Works must match that academic year-specific curriculum as documented in the GA. The annual “sign-off” of Degree Works curriculum will no longer be a separate process. Approval of official curriculum as documented in the GA will simultaneously be approval of that official curriculum in Degree Works for applicable academic programs. Previews of the approved 2017-2018 curricular requirements for any academic program in Degree Works will be available upon request.
To ensure that all information is correct, during each round of reviews (three total), departments/programs will be required to review and "sign off" on their GA text for the 2017-2018 publication. During each round, each department/program is asked to review their proposed 2017-18 GA text and indicate on the sign-off memo that they have either:
After the OTR has received the sign-off memo, we will update the GA Edit Status Dashboard below tracking the Programs of Study edit process throughout all three rounds until the 2017-2018 GA is published.
