Curriculum Innovation at Chaffey College
How Chaffey migrated easily, empowered agile workflows, and reclaimed thousands of hours with META
Who’s Involved
- Shireen Awad, Curriculum Specialist, Instruction and Institutional Effectiveness, Chaffey College
- With over 10 years of experience managing curriculum processes at Chaffey, Shireen has played a critical role in leading the institution’s transition to agile, transparent, and efficient academic operations.
Customer Takeaways
“Acadea has transformed how Chaffey and I manage curriculum by streamlining complex processes into efficient, transparent, and agile workflows. Its technology integrates curriculum tracking, communication, and oversight, allowing all key stakeholders to actively participate in the process.”
— Shireen Awad, Curriculum Specialist, Chaffey College
Summary
When Chaffey College transitioned from Acadea’s V2 platform to META, the goal was clear: streamline curriculum workflows, reduce friction points, and empower faculty and committees with more intuitive tools. Working closely with Acadea, Chaffey successfully launched customized workflows—like their mid-cycle update process—that reduced Curriculum Committee workload by up to 15 hours every two weeks.
With META, Chaffey unlocked the ability to think creatively about curriculum oversight, enabled faster proposal movement, and improved transparency and collaboration across teams. And thanks to META’s intuitive design and low-lift implementation, they did it all without burdening IT—while recovering thousands of hours in curriculum-related productivity, annually.
The Challenge
While Acadea’s previous V2 platform served Chaffey well for many years, its limitations began to show. Occasional bugs disrupted workflows and introduced administrative workarounds, sometimes forcing proposals to bypass crucial review steps. This created barriers to transparency and limited the ability to experiment with more efficient processes. Faculty hesitated to engage with the system, and Shireen’s team spent valuable time manually moving proposals and maintaining outdated protocols.
The Solution
In 2019, Chaffey began transitioning to META, Acadea’s flagship curriculum management technology offering, officially going live in Fall 2020. The implementation was smooth, fast, and required minimal IT involvement, living up to Acadea’s promise of being the easiest system to migrate to in higher ed. Weekly working sessions with Acadea’s client services manager ensured challenges—like data inconsistencies during transfer—were quickly resolved.
With META, Shireen and her team introduced:
While the course requirements tab needed some initial adjustment, faculty consistently reported that META was “way better” than V2 and far more intuitive overall. That ease of use has led to strong faculty adoption—a testament to Acadea’s commitment to making META the easiest curriculum platform to use on the market.
The Result
META didn’t just speed things up, it changed the way Chaffey thinks about curriculum management.
10–15 hours saved every two weeks for the Curriculum Committee through streamlined mid-cycle reviews
Over 10,000 hours of productivity reclaimed annually, thanks to automation, mid-cycle workflows, and reduced manual tracking.
Smoother collaboration across SLOs, curriculum committees, and catalog coordinators
Faster proposal movement with automated workflows
Increased transparency, as stakeholders can now see and interact with the process in real time
A major time-saver for catalog production, reducing manual coordination
Perhaps most importantly, META gave the Chaffey team the ability to innovate—reimagining workflows, empowering faculty, and thinking beyond traditional review processes.
“If we didn’t have this technology, we’d likely still be operating with outdated processes. META lets us think outside the box.” — Shireen Awad
In Conclusion
Chaffey College’s transformation illustrates what’s possible when institutions pair thoughtful process leadership with adaptable, modern curriculum management tools. From day one, Acadea was more than just a vendor—they were a true partner, responding to feedback, offering proactive support, and enabling Chaffey to build workflows that work for them.
Chaffey’s journey proves what’s possible when an institution has the right partner, the right tools, and the right mindset, especially when those tools are the easiest to implement, the easiest to use, and deliver real, measurable time savings at scale.
“META is intuitive, customizable, and supports the unique needs of each institution. It’s a game changer.”
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