Table of Contents
Overview
Monitoring Departmental Status
Adding Departments
Editing Departments
Workflow Settings
Related Articles
Overview
In Academic Scheduling, all courses are associated with an academic department.
In most cases, Departments will be pre-loaded into the Coursedog platform during the technical integration with your SIS or through a CSV upload.
Once configured, the Department feature becomes a useful way to filter courses and course section offerings throughout the application.
Department filters are available on list pages, sandboxes, and various reports where applicable.
Monitoring Departmental Status
PATH: Scheduling > Home
Page Contents
“Departmental Status” is the default view for the Academic Scheduling homepage. It captures:
Department display name
Scheduler(s) associated with that department
Number of courses
Number of sections
Number of conflicts (rule violations/errors)
Validation status
Submission status
Submission Status
There are three potential submission statuses:
Not Started – Indicates no editing activity has occurred at the department level.
In Progress – Indicates the department has started manipulating section data.
Submitted – Indicates the department's Schedule Validation Request (if any) has been fully approved. If there isn't a Schedule Validation Workflow associated with the department, a status of "submitted" means the Schedule has been fully submitted (auto-approved).
Adding Departments
PATH: Scheduling > Settings > Departments
If academic section data is being imported from the SIS, subject records will be automatically added to Coursedog as they are imported. However, subject records can also be manually added and edited directly in Coursedog as well.
Step One: Click “+ Department”
Step Two: Enter the following information:
Department Display Name – A shorthand department name that will appear on screen.
Full Name – The department’s complete name.
Effective Start & End Dates (Optional) – If effective dates are defined, then the home page will filter out departments whose effective dates do not encompass the viewing term dates.
Subject Code – A code that corresponds to an area of study to which courses are assigned.
Status – Select either “Active” or “Inactive” from the dropdown menu.
Department Validation Workflow – Choose the intended workflow from the dropdown menu. To learn more about this functionality, refer to this article.
Hide in Scheduling and Hide in Events (Optional) – These fields default to 'No'. To learn more about this functionality, refer to this article.
Step Three: Click “Add” to save.
Editing Departments
PATH: Scheduling > Settings > Departments > (Select Department)
Step One: Make the necessary adjustments.
Step Two: Click “Save”.
Workflow Settings
PATH: Scheduling > Settings > Departments > (Select Department) > Workflow Step
Overview
All proposals go through an approval workflow.
If you have proposals that are associated with specific departments, you can use dynamic steps to automatically generate the workflow step based on that department.
For this to work, you need to configure the workflow settings within each department.
From inside the department, select “Workflow Step”, and you will be able to edit the workflow settings for this department. This behaves exactly like a standard workflow step.
- When you add a participant, you will be able to configure their workflow step permissions. Learn more about workflow step permissions for department members here and here.
You will also want to check your merge settings to confirm your environment is set up to prevent dynamic steps from being wiped during each nightly merge (see "Integration Configuration" below).
Integration Configuration
In order to prevent department dynamic steps from being removed in your nightly merge, smWorkflowStep needs to be set as “Always Coursedog” in merge settings.
This is a Coursedog-only setting that will not come from the integration; setting it to “Always Coursedog” will avoid accidental configuration loss.
To confirm this is set to “Always Coursedog”:
Navigate to the Admin Dashboard.
Click “Merge Settings”.
Click the “Departments” tab under “Type-Specific Settings”.
Add “smWorkflowStep” to the list of field-specific exceptions that have the “Source of truth” defined as “Always Coursedog”.
This will be added as a custom exception.
The label and path should both be set to smWorkflowStep.
If you aren’t sure how to set up a custom exception, go here.
