COURSE REGISTRY OVERVIEW

The Course Registry is the central source for K-12 courses which are, or historically have been, available for instruction within the Province. The Registry itself acts as a living repository for all courses offered in BC, and can be viewed or searched by Ministry program areas, schools and school boards, and the general public. Users can do a simple, advanced, or a specific course code search and pull up detailed information about a course, including course code, credit values, its start and end date (if applicable), published course title and catalogue description as well as other pertinent information.

The registry houses all open and closed Ministry Developed courses, Board/Authority Authorized courses, those developed by External Organizations (e.g. Red Cross or Young Drivers of Canada), Locally Developed (LD) courses, and Career Program (CP) courses. The Course Registry uses a unique coding system: the first 4 digits of the High School Transcript "HST" Code developed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and a three digit number which will identify the unique set of learning outcomes associated with the course. Data changes are managed centrally by the Registry Coordinator, based on information provided using the electronic New Course/Course Change form.

The Course Registry is the first stage of a larger registries project that aims to streamline data collection and centralize commonly used information to a single source. Before the Course Registry, managing course data has been a complex process, involving manual notification to several systems and parties of new or closing courses, updating paper or web-based course listings, and continuously resolving differences between listings or databases. The creation of these registries supports improved data quality at the source, centralizes the management and update processes, and eliminates the need for multiple copies of the data that all need to be individually maintained. In this way the Course Registry streamlines business process for users and aligns with the long term vision of the Ministry.