Course Atlas (education)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A course atlas is an online repository created to address the need to aggregate and share a database of credit and noncredit courses offered by one to many educational providers across a state, region, country or around the world to facilitate course planning. Courses listed in the course atlas reflect the availability of what educational providers offer the public or to their private constituents.
[edit] Background
The term course atlas was coined by AcademyOne as a means to describe an online repository built to aggregate, store and enable online searches to support a range of needs such as curriculum alignment, transfer evaluation, cross registration, dual enrollment, study abroad, online registration and course planning.
Historically, colleges, universities, career schools, adult education centers, corporate universities and other educational providers publish course catalogs and listings in a variety of formats. The course atlas combines course listings from individual providers into a single, searchable and maintainable electronic repository abstracting the differences in format to make it easier to search and compare course attributes.
Educational providers also advertise their course offerings online through a variety of formats and systems. A course atlas allows students, faculty, advisors and other interested parties to search the course atlas repository to find courses they may enroll in satisfying program requirements or interests. The course atlas also enables educational providers to denote course objectives, syllabi, learning outcomes, expected competencies and attributes defining the course, such as title, cost, location, method of instruction, length of instruction, meeting times, pre-requisities, co-requisites, number of credits to be awarded and other descriptive elements.
The National Course Atlas[1], published by AcademyOne is one of the first examples of an aggregated course repository established in the United States used to support course planning spanning multiple educational providers. The National Course Atlas is used by government agencies, research centers, higher education, institutions, employers, workforce development organizations and academic advisors in a range of capacities to help facilitate student enrollment and course planning that may or may not lead to a formal credential.
