Academic Settings: Academic Years

Academic years help organize almost all of your school's information—including academics, admissions, student billing, and some portions of financial aid. In Academics, they provide standard timeframes for reporting, help define degrees and course groups, and, through academic terms, they also define your courses, student grades, registration, and so on.

Academic terms are derived from Term Types, which are templates that define how each term behaves. (If you've enabled Superterms, Term Types handles those, too.) Before you add academic years, you should set up your Term Types at Academics > Settings > Term Types.

When you create a new academic year, Populi automatically generates its terms from your active Term Types.

Step 1: Set up Term Types

Before you create academic years, set up Term Types in Academics > Settings > Term Types. Each active Term Type becomes a template for a term that Populi will generate when you create a new academic year.

Step 2: Create the academic year

1. Go to Academics > Settings > Academic Years.
2. Click Add academic year.
3. Enter the start year; Populi will supply the end year (the next consecutive year) based on your entry.
4. Click Save.

Step 3: Review the terms

After you create the academic year, click it in the list to view it and review its terms. The term name links to its page in Academic Term > Info, where you can review and edit its details there (as well as add online enrollment dates, among other things).

• To change a term's dates or other details, click and select Edit term.
• In addition to items like start and end dates, et. al., you can adjust Max. Enrolled/Audit Credits and, if enabled, you can select an LMS Sync tool to use for the term's courses.
• To add a one-off term (that is, not based on a Term Type), click add and fill in the details. Choose Custom as the type if you do not want to link it to a Term Type.
• You can also change start and end dates for multiple terms at once—click edit dates next to Terms.
• When you edit a term, you can change its dates and settings, but you cannot change its level (for example, you cannot change a Superterm into a regular term).

Step 4: Add closures (optional)

Closures are any days in the academic year on which courses will not meet—Christmas Break, for example. When you add a closure, it will automatically block out course meeting times that would otherwise meet on those dates.

1. Click add next to Closures.
2. Enter the closure's name (e.g. Spring Break, Thanksgiving, Festivus, Summertime in tha LBC, etc.
3. Enter start and end dates for the closure. Simply type a date or use the calendar date-picker.
4. Repeat these steps as often as you need to. When you're done, click Save.