About DegreeWorks
In 2015 the Strategic Investment Fund (SIF) awarded funding to support Student Success at Pacific. A foundation of this endeavor was the deployment of a first-class, self-service advising and degree audit system. DegreeWorks was selected as the module to help students establish, monitor, and stay on-track with programs of study. It also serves as an interface and communications tool for faculty and students reviewing degree tracking.
Features of DegreeWorks
- Course of study for all degree programs, often referred to as a student's "four-year plan," in a consistent advisor/student single view.
- Providing a dashboard view of students' progress toward degree completion; highlights essential degree progress milestones and displays completion progress bars.
- Indicating whether a course requirement has been met, is in progress, or is still needed. For outstanding requirements, planned coursework for fulfilling requirements is also displayed.
- Notes feature for advisors to log advising meetings and comments, which are viewable to students.
- Allowing students to set a GPA goal and view the impact of specific courses on meeting their goal and use look-ahead audits to identify if/how a course fulfills a degree requirement, and use what-if audits to explore alternative majors.
- Advanced reporting tools and integration with Pacific's new early alert system to make earlier interventions.
- Allowing students and advisors to "freeze" an audit within DegreeWorks which can be viewed later at any time.
Implementation Timeline/History
2015-2016: DegreeWorks implementation began with the initial scribing and coding of catalogs and courses. The process of scribing and coding included manually entering information contained in previous academic catalogs (back to 2011-2012 academic year) for all programs, majors, and minors into DegreeWorks. Once the data had been created and entered, academic units participated in the validation of the data and provided feedback on the interface. DegreeWorks officially launched for selected degrees in June 2016.
2016-2017: An internal audit undertaken by the Office of the Registrar uncovered inconsistencies with catalog and degree audits. Units were notified and coding was throughout the academic year. Faculty and staff training began as DegreeWorks ran concurrently with CAPP (Pacific's existing degree audit system). Scribing and coding (manually creating and entering the information) of graduate programs was mapped. The first catalog entered was the 2018/2019 catalog year and all preceding years thereafter until 2015/2016 catalog were completed.
2017-2018: Scribing and coding for all undergraduate programs was completed in spring - DegreeWorks became fully functional for undergraduate programs and validation began at the individual academic unit level. Department validations were scheduled to be completed in Summer 2018. Scribing and coding of graduate programs continued.
2018-2019: All undergraduate programs of study and subsequent edits were completed by the end of 2018/2019 academic year. Some graduate programs began testing with academic units during Summer/Fall 2018 and moved into Production. The remaining graduate programs were tested in spring 2019. Full migration into production was completed by the end of 2018/2019 academic year. Incomplete degree reporting began testing in Summer 2018. CAPP was official phased out.
2019-2020 and Beyond: DegreeWorks continues to be refined for maximizing service to undergraduate and graduate programs. New reporting features are being deveoped in collaboration with Ellucian and Pacific Technology.
