Acalog is more than a catalog—it’s a marketing tool, recruitment tool, and student engagement tool rolled into one. To be an efficient and effective university, you need Acalog.
Sarah Schraeder
Curriculum and Academic Program Analyst
www.sjsu.edu
Catalog: https://catalog.sjsu.edu/
- 36,000 students
- 4,300 employees
- 250 areas of study
- Four year public university
The old San José State University course catalog was a relic created in the 1990s with an outdated format based on a fixed template. There was no user interaction, only lists of class descriptions for students to scroll through. If a change was needed, it had to be made on every page—global editing didn’t exist.
Even worse, final changes could only be approved by the external developer, which posed a real problem when they weren’t available.
“When we had urgent updates that needed to take place immediately, we had to patiently wait for a response from the external developer. With Acalog, I click a button and the update is published,” said Sarah Schraeder, SJSU’s Curriculum and Academic Analyst.
As long-time users of Omni CMS, Schraeder and her team were accustomed to the flexibility, ease-of-use and seamless integration provided by Omni CMS. Why couldn’t a catalog tool provide them with the same web governance, easy features and dynamic interaction?
Watching an Acalog demo sealed the deal. Acalog is a best-in-class, interactive catalog management software that lets you connect campus systems and websites directly into your catalog. In less than five months, Acalog was fully integrated into the university’s system. With a host of features, the new catalog tool makes it quicker and easier for Schraeder and her team to create, publish and maintain San José State’s course catalog.
With Acalog, they can:
- Add permalinks so that if students click on a course, they quickly see the course description, prerequisites, and other related information.
- Tag specific topics, programs, certifications and tracks to make filtering easier.
- Migrate and import content with ease from departments across campus.
- Make global edits instead of having to hunt for every page that needs an update.
- Control version auditing so that users know who made changes, when and why.
Acalog also transformed students into power users with all the information they need to plan their college careers found in one easy-to-access catalog.
“Our students and users now interact with catalog information in much more dynamic ways than they could before,” said Schraeder.
Results
- Easily manage a catalog for 36,000 students with three staff members.
- Improves accessibility that meets WCAG 2.1 standards.
- Dynamic, searchable catalog with content that’s easy-to-find.
- Greater reach as the catalog can now be crawled by Google Analytics.
- Easily export catalog excerpts to share with Veteran’s Affairs Office and TES.
Conclusion
“With our old catalog, it felt as if we were in the wrong century,” Schraeder said. “With Acalog, we have entered the 21st century. Acalog takes our catalog to the next level.”
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