What is Oxford's Teaching Unit Management System?

The Teaching Unit Management System is a University-wide database for recording and sharing information about the teaching that is offered at Oxford in various programmes of study, to be 'consumed' by other systems, including Canvas.

 

What is the Teaching Unit Management System?

The University is introducing a new Teaching Unit Management System, which for the first time, brings together in one place, information about which teaching components are offered within Oxford’s award-bearing, Visiting Student and Recognised Student Programmes of Study (for which SITS: Vision is the University’s student records system).

The new system does not replace locally managed information sources, such as course handbooks, but serves as a tool to collate some of that key information in a shared, University-wide repository, using a consistent format and structure. It is currently in the ‘early adopter’ phase and populated with data from a number of departments. Once formally launched (later in 2021), Local Canvas Coordinators and Unit Administrators will be able to add relevant data from the Teaching Unit Management System when managing their Canvas courses (which may be organised according to this hierarchy of types: Programme Group, Programme, Stage, Strand, Teaching Unit). Some of that data will be there for all programmes from the start; for other programmes it won’t be there until the department populates the Teaching Unit Management System with data. 

Further information about the system is available from the Teaching Unit and Sign Up project webpage.

Note: At present (February 2021), Local Canvas Coordinators and Unit Admins simply need to take note of progress in the project. Later they will be able to edit the Teaching Data Items associated with programmes of study (if necessary) – see our page (section 2) on Editing Teaching Data Items. These teaching data items are simply 'tags' to indicate which units are taught across a programme of study. There may or may not be a corresponding Canvas course for each teaching unit.

 

Possible future benefits

The Teaching Unit Management System project has been completed. Data from the system is used by the central Canvas team when creating new Canvas courses, to ensure that the courses are located in the correct sub-account and follow desired course organisation conventions. Envisaged future benefits include:

  1. To make it possible to search for and find Canvas courses in a structured way (e.g. to search for courses based on their related programme(s) or owning departments) within a Canvas Course Index that is on the Canvas roadmap (but has not yet been prioritised for implementation);
  2. To enable students to be auto enrolled on Canvas courses – this depends on the development of an integration that makes use of sign-up data from the Teaching Unit Management System to enrol students on relevant instances of corresponding Canvas courses (this is a possible future integration that is not yet approved, nor funded).