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1/19/2007
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ProTraxx to Address the Challenges of Topic Codes
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January 19, 2007 - Over the past several years, ProTraxx has worked closely with school districts and professional
development providers to simplify the record keeping procedures mandated by the State of Connecticut’s
Department of Education and published in the Connecticut Guidelines for the Issuance of Continuing
Education Units and the CEU Procedures Manual.
Each activity offered for CEU must be assigned a Topic Code – a number which uniquely identifies the
specific subject area and content standard from the Curriculum Frameworks to define the learning experience.
The challenge for providers has been in choosing only one, as most learning experiences are not limited to
one specific subject. Therefore, a selected code may not always accurately represent the content of the
session. As a result, the promotion, analysis and reporting of this data is quite often incomplete or inaccurate.
For example, if a district offers a class that addresses use of computers in the classroom through the
development of student created rubrics for writing, how is this class coded? Should it be a 302 as it
meets the technical requirement for elementary, middle and high school teachers, or should it be
language arts 037? Most providers will choose the code that meets the requirement, in this case 302.
However, when searching and reporting against your database, the result set would not include this
activity if you were looking for those that related to language arts – you would only find it if
you searched specifically for 302 coded classes. You wouldn’t find it if you searched the Group
Topic for Technology either, making it further difficult to accurately quantify offerings and participation.
In response to our client’s expressed need to better identify classes, ProTraxx made a proposal
to the State Department of Education to allow for the further grouping of activity offerings.
They approved our request late last year and commended ProTraxx for its commitment to serving
the districts of Connecticut. The selection of a primary topic code will still be required,
but the addition of the alignment of each activity with one or more general subject areas
should significantly improve the integrity of the resulting data for our clients.
The new subject areas will become a searchable field for chosen reports and will become a
grouping option for promotion through the online catalogs.
A PowerUsers session is being planned to discuss the development requirements for these
new subject areas. ProTraxx will be seeking participation by key district personnel
involved in the planning, tracking, and reporting of professional development
including the CEU Coordinators and their support staff or team. Interested clients
should contact Pat Kell at 1.866.398.7299, ext. 111 for more information about
inclusion this important planning session.
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