The Faculty Senate's Key Word project is turning into a reality for the fall 2001 academic year with the help of the Registrar's Office and Information Technology and Communication.
The Key Word project aims to update the Course Offering Directory by creating a system that will allow students to enter key words and receive a list of courses in all departments matching the requested topic.
The project has progressed since its inception in September 2000 when the Faculty Senate was exploring ways "to bridge gaps between disciplines and departments, for students and faculty alike," said Julian Connolly, project coordinator and professor of Slavic languages and literature.
"It will hopefully be available next [academic] year," Faculty Senate Chairwoman Patricia H. Werhane said.
Many departments and schools at the University already have submitted key words selected by their faculty, Connolly said.
The next step will be editing and condensing the lists and sending them back to the departments.
The departments then will send the keywords and available courses to the Registrar's office to be listed along with the COD.
"The University Registrar's office is very interested in helping us achieve this capability," Connolly said. "Individuals in that office have been consulting with ITC to see what can be done in this regard."
The project also will provide benefits for faculty members by enabling them to "find out what faculty in other departments might be working in areas of interest similar to their own," Connolly said.
"How it will work is still up in the air," Werhane said.
The new system may use hypertext, course descriptions or keywords listed by courses, she said.
ITC is exploring the option of incorporating keywords into the online COD, instead of creating an entire search engine, Connolly said.
Faculty Senate members say they have plans for even better search mechanisms in the future.
"The Key Word project would represent an intermediary step on the path to a full course description search capability," Connolly said.
In a full course description search engine, the entire course description could be searched instead of just keywords, making it even easier to find courses of interest he added.
"Students should be able to access courses of their interest in a variety of disciplines without literally leafing through the COD either literally or online," Werhane said.
Not only will it make course selection easier, but students will be exposed to new ideas from many perspectives on topics that interest them, she added.
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