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What's wanted for the course catalogue

By Steve Draper,   Department of Psychology,   University of Glasgow.

This page is mainly for me to collect requirements for a decent course catalogue for visiting students.

This is mainly for the ones I deal with: US students doing highly heterogenous mixes of modules usually from multiple departments in several faculties.

They need a search window that takes a few key words and returns hits in either course module titles and/or the body of the text describing the course. The data is all (now) already in CCIMS. The structure in terms of departments and degree programmes is mostly irrelevant.

The current catalogue structure (browsing by department) probably won't do when honours options are all listed. The data needs to be taken from CCIMS (auto-feed?): i.e. course codes, course titles, para descriptions. A Google domain search would do fine if the catalogue was in its own URL domain, and if all the course description text was open to Google's crawlers (not hidden in a database).

What's essentially needed?

  • A new web interface for foreign students. The way they need to search for courses is completely different from home students.
  • A search facility e.g. google
  • Getting the data out of CCIMS and into web files. A giant query caught in a file?
  • Failing that, getting a complete list of course titles plus database queries to go from these to the full CCIMS entry.

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