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Academic/Course Custom Fields

Brent Jones

April 24, 2024 16:56

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It would be helpful if it were possible to add custom fields to courses in the course catalog and instances of a course scheduled in an academic term.  Ideally, custom fields created and data added to those custom fields at the catalog level would pull down to the instance of a course scheduled for a specific academic term.  It would also be ideal if the custom field data at the instance level in a scheduled academic term could be modified for that specific academic term instance.

There are elements specific to individual institutions that can need to be added to course catalog entries.  It would also benefit institutions that use additional software in addition to Populi to be able to tag Populi courses with information that would make courses identifiable to other applications.

Thank you!

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2 comments

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  Adam Sentz April 24, 2024 18:26

  Brent Jones - Can you provide some examples/use-cases so we can have a better idea of what you want to be able to do?

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  Brent Jones April 24, 2024 20:00

  Sure.  The following are three example use cases - 2 programmatic and 1 human - in rough order of importance to us:

  1. Webhooks - We use a few external applications, and Populi webhooks have significantly simplified our ability to synchronize actions between applications.  There are some situations where the action triggered by a webhook is different depending on the course (e.g. the action triggered by scheduling Gen. Psych. is different than the action triggered by English Comp.).  We can maintain a database that defines a few elements related to courses and then have any script triggered by the Populi webhook check the database prior to executing any action, but it would simplify our lives if we could add information to the Populi course record directly that was included with the webhook payload.  In our situation, it would be very convenient if custom fields created in catalog course could be edited at the course offering level for that offering (term and section) only - but I recognize that CatalogCourse objects and CourseOffering objects are entirely different.
  2. API Filtering - Custom fields can be used as filtering parameters when making GET requests for Person objects.  It would be very helpful for us to be able to using custom fields as filter parameters when making GET requests for CatalogCourse objects.  We can request the entire catalog or all CourseOffering objects in a term and filter the returned payload down to the specific objects needed, but it would be simpler for us to filter in advance.
  3. Course Organization/Filtering within Populi - We have operations in 3-4 modalities (campus, online, hybrid, correspondence) and 2 languages (English and Spanish).  Since we maintain one catalog, it would be helpful for us to be able to add custom fields to our catalog courses that we could better organize our courses (our modalities and languages make a messy Venn diagram...).  If we could then filter by custom fields in a similar way that we can filter contacts by custom fields, it would help us with everything from planning to reporting to scheduling.

  I very much appreciate your willingness to consider this suggestion!