Curriculum & Instructional Support releases updated CMU academic bulletin website
All Central Michigan University students were notified of an updated academic bulletin website via email Feb. 1 from executive director of Curriculum & Instructional Support Peter Ross.
The webpage was completely redesigned to include a newly formatted, interactive 2018-2019 academic bulletin, as well as PDF versions for all previous academic years.
While describing the new website, Ross said, "It should be noted that versions of the Bulletin prior to the current year, 2018-19, are only available in PDF format."
Tecumseh sophomore Emily Phelan is a special education major who says the 2017-2018 PDF bulletin version is "not very informative."
"If I wanted to look at what I have to do for my major, it's not enough information for me to know what to do," she said.
According to Ross, there is some initial discussion about making sections of previous bulletins available in the web-based format, however, there is no final decision on the matter.
The planning process to update the bulletin began around July 2017, Ross said, and the platform vendor (SmartCatalog) was selected in May 2018. The content-building and design process then began.
"The previous Bulletin website was created in 2004," Ross said. "It was no longer able to be updated to reflect CMU’s current web presence, functionality, or preferred format."
In addition to the website being outdated, merging main and global campus information motivated CMU to update the bulletin webpage.
"The new bulletin website is more robust, interactive, and welcoming and continues CMU’s commitment to being assistive and accessible to all university constituents," Ross said.
A recent change made Feb. 26 on the updated website allows for better differentiation of which links are web-based versus PDF. This change consisted of an edit in the headings for the listed 2018-2019 bulletins, as the interactive and PDF links were not previously entitled such.
Since the new bulletin site first launched, the Curriculum & Instructional Support Office has received limited but positive feedback, Ross said.
