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Course Group Subclass

Steve Sutcliffe

July 18, 2012 00:24

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It would be very handy to be able to include a course group within a course group. 

For instance, we have a course group called 'wisdom literature' and a separate course group called "Poetry", usually people are required to take 3 cr hrs of each. But we also have a course group called 'Wisdom literature and Poetry', which includes all the courses in the 'wisdom literature' category and all the courses in the 'Poetry' category, and usually students only need to take 3 cr hrs from this combined group.  For some of our degrees we need the separate 'wisdom literature' group but others use both the 'wisdom & poetry' group. 

So for our case it would be:

As part of the B.A. course groups

....

Wisdom Literature ... 3 cr hrs

Poetry  ......................... 3 cr hrs

As part of the B.Th. Course Groups

Wisdom Literature & Poetry ..... 3 cr hrs

(where Wisdom Literature & Poetry consists of the two groups : "Wisdom Literature" and "Poetry")

This would save a great deal of maintenance when it comes time to edit all these little groups and other groups that also contain the same courses as those groups.

This topic is similar to: https://support.populiweb.com/entries/21005226-degree-audit-enhancement-request-course-group-hierarchy but I think different enough that it warrants its own thread. As in this case we don't really need a hierarchy but just a way to include course groups within course groups.

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5 comments

• 0
  
  Gwen Hacking July 18, 2012 15:27

  I vote yes
• 0
  
  Sherrie Allison July 18, 2012 20:17

  This would help categorize subsections within course groups and ease up program changes.

  Thanks for your consideration

  Sherrie

• 2
  
  Andrew Sears July 29, 2017 12:05

  I agree.  We need this also, as does almost any school with general education requirements. Here 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
  
  Records Office 2 February 13, 2018 17:52

  Our college is in need of an "choice of either X or Y" option for course groups. Some of our corse groups contain a option for students to fulfill a course requirement from a selection of classes, but without an "choice of either X or Y" we have to create a new course group for each selection. If this could be implemented, it would be greatly appreciated.

• 0
  
  Sarah Barkman March 12, 2021 15:22

  Yes, the ability to add a course group to a course group would be so helpful for us too!