Digital Course Outlines: Moving to the Curriculum Management System

In Semester Two 2025, staff will use the new Curriculum Management System to review and edit their course outlines for 2026.

Curriculum Management System (CMS)

The CMS replaces the current Digital Course Outlines (DCOs) editor. It is the single source of truth for programmes, course records (including course outlines), and class information.

The CMS:

• Is an internal-facing system for staff
• Provides a curriculum catalogue capability, mapping courses to curricula
• Enables reporting functionality for various stakeholders, including programme directors, faculty administrators, and course directors
• Supports approval workflows for changes to course outlines and for new and existing programmes
• Interfaces with other University systems including the Student Management System (CS9) (though the CMS does not hold student data), our courses and subject guides (Online Curriculum Catalogue). Our Study Options pages will remain in place for now.

Online Curriculum Catalogue (what students see)

The Online Curriculum Catalogue (OCC) will be the default public-facing site for our course and degree programmes. This system works in parallel with the CMS, automatically pulling information through.

• Online Curriculum Catalogue

What you need to know now

We realise that a lot of change has come our way lately and so we’re trying to make the transition process as seamless as possible.

• In mid-September 2025, the current DCO system will become a ‘read-only’ archive with a banner message directing staff to the new CMS.
• Any outstanding course outlines for 2025 can be reviewed and submitted before Friday 12 September and changes will be imported into the CMS.
• Through September, the project team will be talking to people in your faculty and sending out comms on what you have to do.
• Towards the end of 2025, the old DCO’s public-facing pages will be hidden so that search engines can’t direct students to old course information.

We want to encourage people into the CMS and hope that you will be inspired to make sure your course outline is as accurate as possible. And, if nothing needs to change, you don’t need to do anything.

We’re keen to hear from anyone struggling with the CMS or need clarification so that we can make it better. You can email the project team with your questions; they are available to help until the end of 2025.

Reviewing, editing, and publishing course outlines

A video tour of the annual review of course outlines is available on the Staff Intranet, along with comprehensive guides for staff to work through the CMS at their own pace (the link to the guides is also available at the bottom of the CMS ‘home’ screen).

• View the guides

One-to-one support is available for staff to book a session.

• On demand CMS support

Until full integration between CMS and Canvas is provisioned in 2026, course facilitators are asked to provide a link on their course syllabus page to the course outline information on the Online Curriculum Catalogue. Alternatively, download any updated course outline information—a PDF will be generated by the CMS—and upload it to their course syllabus.

Log in to the CMS

Staff can log in to the CMS using their University of Auckland credentials.

Future capability

Integration between the CMS and Canvas—for automatically populating the course syllabus—is planned for 2026.

We also hope to extend the CMS capability to include an additional suite of tools called the ‘Curriculum Advisor’. This enables CMS integration with the enrolments and timetabling systems, and the Electronic Records Management (ERMS), so that students are better equipped for planning and tracking their degree progress through to graduation.

Page updated after published 03/09/2025 (clarified terminology – DCOs now called course outlines)