ANU SAS Forum
11 September, 2014
Student Administrative Services
Integrated AIMS and
MAPPS systems
Patricia McCauley
Manager
Student Administrative Services
Academic Information Management System
AIMS is both:
• An academic proposal management system that supports the
specification and maintenance of approval workflows and
notifications, in accordance with the UNSW academic governance
framework and the UNSW Council approved Register of
delegations; and
• A system of records designed to support the maintenance of a rich
set of core information about UNSW academic offerings (Courses,
Streams, Single and Dual Award Programs and the underlying
academic rules for these), i.e. operational management support.
Some of the information in AIMS may be maintained outside of
formal proposals through the ‘minor change’ function that allows for
Faculty-level authoring and approval of changes to individual fields
not subject to approval through formal governance processes.
AIMS Supports:
• A range of user roles including authors, endorsers, approvers,
interested parties, committee secretaries, and admin support
• Flexible endorsement workflows that can be configured for each
Faculty and type of proposal
• Ability to view the history of edits to a record as well as ‘point in
time’ capture of proposals to support committee agenda preparation
and legislative record keeping requirements
• Email notifications
• Comments at the proposal and field levels
• Document attachment
• Basic learning outcomes management (curriculum mapping)
• Academic rules logic, a rules editor, and user-friendly plain English
displays for validation of academic rules (under development).
Supports ‘depth’ and ‘breadth’ rules management
AIMS Planned improvements:
• A ‘summary view’ feature that collates a range of information
relating to specific set of data into one page for easy review, e.g.
Admissions, CRICOS, FOE etc
• Reporting
• Program Disestablishment
• Mapping of Course Learning Outcomes to Program Learning
Outcomes
• SiMs (Peoplesoft) integration
Potential areas for improvement*
• More efficient support for cyclical maintenance of data, e.g. mass
annual updates to ATARs, tuition fees, etc
• Simplified management of non-structural revisions to academic
rules, e.g. adding or removing courses from elective lists
• Extension of minor change function to include central approval
for sensitive data changes, e.g. FOEs
• Tailoring of information presentation to specific audiences so that
they are presented with the information that is pertinent to them for
decision making. The planned ‘summary view’ feature under
development may assist in supporting this need.
• Look at more formulaic ways of capturing some information
such as entry requirements to improve consistency, clarity and
potential for deployment in process support. The PG CRSW
Admissions Simplification Project currently in progress will provide
an important input to this.
Potential areas for improvement*
• Address the duplication of information in different areas of AIMS.
This issue is currently most apparent in handbook descriptions that
tend to repeat information also included elsewhere in proposals,
introducing the risk of inconsistencies and conflicts.
Subject to approval, the plan in the future is to collate core
information in handbook entries as much as possible from data
fields and codified rules so that such information is maintained in a
single space. Handbook descriptions can then be focussed on
‘softer’ contextual and descriptive information that supplements or
complements the data elements.
* Subject to user consultation, governance approval and resourcing.
Potential to support new services*
• Academic Portfolio Publishing including online published “catalogues”
to replace the current Handbook, and the ability for Faculties to access
customised datasets for Faculty websites, marketing and collateral etc
• Tuition fee publishing
• Student program planner referencing the academic rules in AIMS.
• Student progress checker for system supported graduation ‘check out’.
• Curriculum Mapping referencing the rules in AIMS to make
connections between course, stream, and program learning outcomes
and graduate capabilities.
• Student learning outcomes maps with personalised presentation of
learning outcomes mapping.
• Support for academic program reviews and accreditation.
* Subject to user consultation, governance approval and resourcing.
Planned prototyping work – currently being
undertaken by the Faculty of Engineering
• Handbook replacement prototype focussing on courses initially
• Personalised study planner prototype focussing on 1st year
initially
• Curriculum mapping prototype including validation of program
structures against the competency requirements of Engineering
Australia
Management of Proposals and Portfolio System
(MAPPS)
• Online service for managing University Committees
• Integrated with AIMS for either ‘static’ or ‘dynamic’ view
• Faculty Standing Committees must make all changes to programs
two weeks prior to the next Undergraduate Studies C’ttee (USC) /
Postgraduate Coursework C’ttee (PCC) meeting, and then finalised
prior to distribution of the ‘meeting pack’, which is usually one week
before the meeting.
• USC / PCC members review program proposals via ‘static’ links
provided in the meeting pack. Any amendments made subsequent
to circulation of the ’static’ links in the meeting pack need to be
tabled by the Faculty representative.
• This will improve awareness of timing requirements between
approval of program proposals at Faculty level and USC/PCC level.