This content was written prior to the renaming of Watermark products in July 2021, and refers to an old product name. To learn more about the new names for Watermark products, read our press release here.
NEW YORK— June 18, 2019 –Watermark, a pioneer in educational intelligence, is pleased to announce its Syllabus Management capabilities. With Syllabus Management, institutions can efficiently create, approve, and publish syllabi, as well as streamline approval workflows and reduce the amount of time faculty spend creating syllabi. With time saved on coordinating these processes, faculty and administrators can ensure students have clearer, more consistent resources to inform their academic planning, as well as proactive communication of learning outcomes prior to courses starting — an important step in increasing student preparedness.
“Having a centralized repository of current, historical, and in-process syllabi gives department and program chairs an easier way to generate reports needed for accreditation, directly link courses to learning outcomes for students, and share up-to-date syllabi in readily available locations, such as the institution’s website. This gives students better access to the kind of information needed for course selection,” said Bennett Morrison, Vice President of Product Management for Watermark.
Collecting syllabi data and ensuring consistency in structure is also a significant challenge. Programmatic and regional accreditors require not only evidence of syllabi for courses, but also specific content, such as program missions, objectives, as well as standards and outcomes mapped to course objectives. With Syllabus Management, institutions can simplify syllabi creation and review processes with customizable templates, incorporate defined learning outcomes, ensure current and consistent syllabi are available for every scheduled course and section offered during an academic term, and demonstrate alignment between offerings and accreditation standards.
SmartCatalog Syllabus Management by Watermark is designed to extend the capabilities of Watermark’s existing curriculum and catalog management as well as assessment solutions. Institutions can pull content from the course catalog to align to courses, and route syllabi through a defined, multi-step approval process, similar to curriculum — alleviating the administrative burden of manually retrieving, tracking, and assessing syllabi across units, departments, and programs. Administrators can combine faculty-authored content with centrally documented policies, course descriptions, and links to learning outcomes, as well as more effectively close the loop to ensure course objectives, learning outcomes, and assessment results are effectively translated into improved academic offerings for students.
“Our goal with Syllabus Management is to increase efficiencies, integrate core academic processes, and streamline creation and review processes in order to capture the connections between course data and program learning outcomes. We want to reduce the amount of time institutions spend preparing for accreditation, and instead, help them more easily use their data to make meaningful improvements to teaching and learning,” said Debra Regan, Senior Vice President of Strategy & GM of SmartCatalog by Watermark.
Watermark currently supports over 1,700 higher education institutions with its innovative solutions for assessment, ePortfolios, faculty activity reporting, course evaluations, institutional surveys, as well as curriculum, catalog and syllabus management. Since 2017, Watermark has grown significantly through bringing together market-leading higher education technology providers in support of a shared vision for improving learning through educational intelligence.
Syllabus Management is part of SmartCatalog by Watermark and can also be used as a stand-alone solution.