Good Morning:
OCHE is revamping the Montana University System's inventory of academic programs. This inventory is meant to serve as the authoritative record of degree programs, options, and minors approved through the Board of Regents. The current inventory is both poorly structured and out of date, which makes it challenging for your campuses to demonstrate to accreditors and the US Department of Education that a program has been approved and also limits OCHE's ability to communicate to students, parents, communities and legislators what offerings are available.
I attach a template for this new program inventory that includes both definitions for each field and a second sheet where your campus can enter its information. This template has been vastly improved thanks to helpful feedback and ideas from MACRAO, the MUS eLearning Committee, colleagues at Reach Higher Montana and others. Many on this email have been extraordinarily helpful, and we have a much more useful structure as a result.
This email is being sent to chief academic officers, registrars, and members of the MUS eLearning community. I imagine registrars will be primarily responsible for filling in this information on each campus, in consultation with these other groups. Registrars, could you please work to fill-in and return this template to me at jthiel@montana.edu by Tuesday, March 31st.
When filling in the template, please:
- Include an entry for each minor and each option. For example, MSU-Bozeman's BS in Environmental Sciences has five options. This should correspond with five entries (rows) in the program inventory template.
- Only include options which have been approved by the Board of Regents. Informal advising tracks or concentrations should not be listed.
- Some campuses use multiple codes in banner to refer to a single program. The template includes columns to allow you to list all codes that refer to a single program. If a program has multiple options, this list of codes at the program level may be repeated across the rows in the template listing each option.
- 2020 CIP codes are available for use now on the NCES webpage (https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cipcode/default.aspx?y=56). I would prefer that you populate the CIP_2020 field in the template provided. If this isn't possible on this timeline, let me know so we can agree to a strategy for capturing 2020 CIP codes from your campus.
A very valid concern was raised as to how we plan to keep this inventory up to date. In the short term, we will update the inventory as academic items come through OCHE or the Board. In the mid-term, we are working to stand up a web-submission and review process for academic approvals that would automatically update this database and assist with audits for accuracy.
If you run into corner-cases or questions while filling out the template, please do reach out. I am happy to help troubleshoot.
Kind Regards,
Joseph Thiel
Director of Academic Policy and Research
Montana University System
