Mendoza’s portfolio of graduate degrees continues to grow, as evidenced by the recently announced MS in Digital Marketing and MS in Business Analytics focused on Sports Analytics. As more programs have been added or expanded, the graduate course labeling and numbering system broke down. Therefore, we set out to revise the system in a way that better serves students, faculty, and staff by clarifying and simplifying the management, reporting, and tracking of Mendoza graduate course offerings.

We had four goals in mind when creating this new system:

(1) Map courses to the primary program they serve and do so in a visible way using course prefixes;
(2) Identify the academic department responsible for the course;
(3) Eliminate as many (unnecessary) cross lists as possible; and
(4) Do not break anything!

The new system will help us better understand and plan the level of faculty and space resources that are devoted to operating each of our programs. This is something that is not generally possible with the way our current system is designed and thus, it requires manual processing and our own internal reports that do not align with the University’s systems.

By mapping each course to the primary program it serves and the academic department responsible for the course, it immediately allows various stakeholders to see who is responsible for the course, what program it serves, if a student is eligible to take the course and so on. In the spirit of our matrix structure for graduate programs, consider each program as a vertical and the departmental course coverage as a horizontal. Departments need to allocate limited faculty resources across programs in a way that aligns with faculty expertise and program needs. There also needs to be classrooms available for the course to be offered, of course. With the new system, we can easily look across the verticals by department or across the horizontals by program.

We started this process by reviewing the entire catalog of graduate courses and reimagining the way courses could map to academic departments and programs. This led to restructuring Mendoza’s course data elements (i.e., attributes) to align with the Registrar’s system and processes, which utilizes a hierarchy of (only) four levels: college, division, department, and subject code (or what we often call the prefix). (If we designed their system, by the way, we would also include location, modality, and program.)

Mendoza’s historical usage of “Course Department” and “Course Prefix” has not been consistent because the College often “thinks” in terms of programs, and we had legacy organizational structures that were used as the department attribute, yet they were not actually academic departments. Rather, these organizational structures held their portfolio of courses from across our academic departments. Thus, “departmental reporting” was not accurate with regard to our academic departments because of the way in which the attributes were codified in the system.

For example, consider the legacy organizational unit of “Executive Education.” All academic departments provide courses to that legacy organizational unit and thus it was codified in the Registrar’s system as “department.” This meant that, for example, University reporting did not allow for courses by academic department overall or within any of the programs in Executive Education. Further, because multiple programs were nested within this organizational unit (e.g., EMBA-Chicago, EMBA-South Bend, MSF-Chicago, MSBA-Chicago) all of these were codified as a single department; the organizational units conflated information about our actual departments, namely the five academic departments.

However, we have now modified many of the course numbers to use the Registrar's system while also making it easy to identify the program a course serves. For example, in the old system, a 70000 ACCT course that ended in “1” would map to the MSA program, yet those that end in “0” would map to the MBA. Now, MSA courses will have their own course prefix and so will MBA courses, for example. All programs will now have their own unique prefix. However, departmental prefixes will be used for the undergraduate program and Ph.D. courses. Further, the academic department responsible for the course will be codified in the attribute “department” rather than our legacy organization structures currently used.

Starting in Summer 2022 and going forward, all courses in the Mendoza College of Business will belong to one of the following ”departments”:

Which will function like a department, or the following three options to codify courses that do not fit into the above:

Note that the first five course departments above are our academic departments. The sixth is the new Business Ethics and Society Program, which will function similarly to an academic department. The latter three are for career courses or program-specific activities codified as courses (e.g., Interterm). Cross-departmental programs (e.g., MBA, MSM, EMNA, MNA, etc.) will have a bit of intelligence built into the course numbering system where the third digit will identify the department (ACCT = 1, FIN = 2, ITAO = 3, MGTO = 4, and MARK = 5).

Revamping our graduate course catalog was no easy feat. To successfully complete this project, more than 200 new course creation forms were submitted and processed by many members of our faculty and staff teams. The changes to course prefixes also require several updates to student-facing documentation as well as updated systems coding in tools like GPS.

For playing a crucial role in the implementation of this project, I want to thank the assistant department chairs Wendy Angst, Jen Waddell, Joe Cherian, Jamie O’Brien and Jason Reed; new M&O assistant department chair Jen Cronin; Morgan McCoy, Carmen Quinn, Christopher Hillak and Jennifer Ransbottom from the Facilities & Program Operations Team; Ashley Heberling and Bailey Smith from the Administrative Support Team; and Rochelle Jones from the Office of the Registrar.

I realize that this was not the most exciting Exchange column! However, this change affects many parts of our organization. Rest assured, though, that these changes help us in a multitude of ways.

Sincerely,

Ken Kelley
Senior Associate Dean for Faculty
Research and Edward F. Sorin Society Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations