Table of Contents
Overview
Effective Dating & Rooms
Example Scenarios
Using “Allowed Sections” as a Workaround for Rooms
Related Articles
Overview
You can schedule multiple terms in Coursedog at once, but effective dates may cause certain data in our system (like rooms) to be relevant for only a single term at a time.
This rationale affects the following additional entities: Rooms, Departments, Buildings, Professors, Notes, Requirement Groups, and Course Attributes.
Careful consideration of this is important to identify potential red flags given your institution's business process and additional configuration recommendations.
Sections and Courses for Scheduling are not affected by this issue as they can be loaded for each term. Additionally, Courses and Programs in Curriculum Management support multiple effective dated revisions. Everything else can be loaded using effective dates but only a single revision can exist in Coursedog.
Effective Dating & Rooms
The room information we GET from your SIS must take as a reference one point in time.
The administrator must pick only one “effective date” to use in Coursedog when we merge data into our system.
Your SIS might associate effective dates with rooms, resulting in the set of rooms listed in Coursedog for Fall 2020 not being the accurate list of rooms for Fall 2021. As a result, both terms may not be effectively scheduled at the same time in regards to accurate reflection of room availability for each term. Rather, it will only be fully accurate for one term.
You can find a detailed scenario, with outcomes, here.
Example Scenarios
The below scenarios could occur as a result of this effective dating logic.
A registrar is building a schedule for Fall 2020 which isn't the “current scheduling term”. The Room data was loaded in Coursedog using the current scheduling term, Spring 2020, as the effective term. Therefore, only rooms that are Active as of Spring 2020 are loaded, and any rooms active only after Spring 2020 will not be available for scheduling. As a result, the registrar cannot find a room for Fall 2020 that he knows is available.
A registrar has already built a schedule for Fall 2020 and is now building for the current scheduling term Fall 2021. They notice, however, that some of the rooms they used in the schedule for Fall 2020 have disappeared from Coursedog. The room assignments are still there, but the registrar is not able to see the names of the rooms.
A department scheduler for a new department that will come online in Fall 2022 logs into Coursedog but doesn't see their department in the list when they go to “view Fall 2021” in the Section Dashboard.
A scheduler wants to add an instructor to a section in Fall 2021. The current scheduling term is set to Fall 2020. They know the instructor is currently on leave, returning in two weeks, but the instructor is not available for scheduling or just doesn't exist in Coursedog.
A scheduler clicks to add a note or a reserve capacity to a section, but finds that the notes inventory doesn't contain the note they want to add, or that the requirement groups they need for the reserve capacity just don't exist in the search/selection list.
A registrar schedules sections in a set of rooms of a specific building for Fall 2021. The next day they notice all of those sections now contain references to a non-existent room and that the building no longer exists in Coursedog.
A scheduler selects to “Add Course From Inventory” and is able to select only courses from the inventory that are correct for that term based on their effective date. In other words: only courses where the Course Effective Start Date (Curriculum) is before or on the Term Start Date (Scheduling > Settings > Terms).
Using “Allowed Sections” as a Workaround for Rooms
Overview
If this logic is problematic for your institution, using “allowed sections” can help serve as a workaround for rooms.
You can learn more about Allowed Sections here.
How It Works
Suggested Setup
Let’s say Room GH 14 will be inactive from 10/01/20 to 10/30/20.
In Rooms > Settings > Allowed Sections, you can set up Allowed Sections as follows:
Any of:
Field → Section End Date → Is Before → 10/01/2020
Field → Section Start Date → Is After → 10/30/2020
The Impact
To understand how this impacts the room's availability to be assigned to a given section, let's say ART 101 - 10 has a Section Start Date of 08/20 and a Section End Date of 12/20, both of which default from the Term.
When assigning a room for ART 101 - 10, GH 14 is NOT an available option. This is CORRECT because the room is unavailable for a period of time between the section start date and section end date.
