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Degree Audit Enhancement Request - Course Group Hierarchy

Kerry Pretty

February 18, 2012 05:41

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Add course group hierarchy such that one course group can be a component of another.This would allow for the following:

Example 1

Course Group X

Take Either (Course A: 3 credits)

        OR     (Course B: 2 credits AND 1 Course from a Course Group C: 1 credit)

 

Example 2

Course Group Z requiring 2 courses from the following list of course groups to be taken:

            Course Group A (Set = only 1 course of)

            Course Group B (Set = only 1 course of)

            Course Group C (Set = only 1 course of)

            Course Group D (Set = only 1 course of)

The result is that the student might take one course from Course Group B and one course from Course Group D to satisfy Course Group Z, but could not take 2 courses from Course Group B.

This capability is especially desirable in the instance when the school changes there programs, such as going from 2 credit to 3 credit courses or combining a number of courses together but still wants to give students who have taken courses in previous years credit in the program for the older version of the course.

 Example:  PS313 Leadership Development I (2 credits) AND

                  PS413 Leadership Development II (2 credits) are combined into

                  PMN 382 Leadership Development (3 credits)

But students taking both of the older version courses do not need to take the new version.

These three courses could be defined as Course Group A requiring 3 credits. It is assumed that the additional credit when the older version of the courses is taken would be counted as an open elective credit contributing to the overall credits for the student’s program. Similar sets of courses could be defined for course group B, and C and so on.

A folder hierarchy for course groups so that a user could put selected course groups into a specific folder would be very helpful as well.

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3 comments

• 0
  
  Gwen Hacking July 18, 2012 15:29

  Yes
• 0
  
  Andrew Sears July 29, 2017 12:08

  I agree this is needed by any school with general education requirements. Note, there are also people questing this here: https://support.populiweb.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/214239507-Course-Group-Subclass

  Below is our use case:

  We have the following General Education Requirements for our Bachelor's that I'm trying to figure out how to use course groups effectively on. 
  1. Minimum of 30 general education credits
  2. Minimum of 3 credits in each of the following 4 areas
  * English / Comm 
  * Social / Behavioral Sciences
  * Humanities & Fine Arts 
  * Math & Natural Sciences

  Any course in one of those 4 areas is considered to be general education and is applied toward the 30 credit total.

  Doing degree requirements and course groups for the first 4 groups works well in your system as I just put a minimum of 3 credits for each of the 4 groups.

  The problem is that I also need to require 30 General Education Credits. I had planned to do that by adding a General Education Course group and enabling courses in the above 4 categories to count in both. i.e. an English Course would be in both the General Education and the English course groups.

  The problem is that when accepting transfer credits, Populi only lets me put the transfer credits into one course group. Is there a way around this? At this point, the only two solutions I can see that would not be a hack are:
  1. If your system allowed course groups to be set as also being in another course group (i.e. English would be a part of General Ed)
  2. If your system allowed transfer credits to be applied to more than one course group.

  The only other solution I can think of would be a hack to require 3 credits in each of the 4 areas (12 credits), and then require 18 General Education Other Credits. But this is less than optimal as it will be confusing to our students and to our accreditors because it does not match our actual requirements in our catalog.

• 0
  
  Robert Frankel August 14, 2018 19:19

  Andrew, what approach did you end up taking?