Table of Contents
Overview
Meetings
Instructors
Allow Duplicate Instructors in Section
“Instructor Assigned to Invalid Session Indicator” Rule
Related Articles
Overview
Coursedog offers a Session Indicator-specific enhancement that, once enabled, will simplify using Session Indicators for Department Schedulers at Banner schools.
If this hasn’t already been enabled for you, an Admin at your institution should reach out to your Project Manager or Customer Success Manager (whoever is your current Coursedog contact).
Once requested, your PM or CSM will work behind the scenes to get this enabled for you (which involves turning on the feature; making some changes to your Section Template; enabling a rule; changing a merge setting and a permission setting; and running a sections merge).
This article outlines what Department Schedulers can see/do – and how to assign instructors to meetings – once this is enabled.
Meetings
Path | Overview | For Schools Where the Session Indicator is Always “01”
For Schools Where the Session Indicator is NOT Always “01”
Path
Academic Scheduling > Section Dashboard > (Click to Open Section) > (Find “Meeting Patterns & Rooms” Card) > Set Details
Overview
When you add meetings, the “session indicator” will be automatically set to “01”.
For Schools Where the Session Indicator is Always “01”
Department Schedulers will not need to manually set the “Session Indicator” value to “01” since that is its default value.
You won’t need to enter the “meeting details” modal to have the value persist or send to Banner – it will do this automatically.
The “Session Indicator” field will be set to “not editable” and will appear in the section editing modal as shown below.
For Schools Where the Session Indicator is NOT Always “01”
If your school does NOT set all session indicators to 01, the field will still default to “01”, but it will be editable.
For any meeting where the Session Indicator isn’t 01, you will need to go into the “Meeting Pattern Additional Information” modal for the section and manually change the Session Indicator, as shown below.
Instructors
Path | Overview | Additional Notes
Path
Academic Scheduling > Section Dashboard > (Click to Open Section) > (Scroll to “Instructors” Card) > Set Instructor Roles & Details
Overview
Instructors added will automatically be assigned to Session Indicator 01, but the field will be set to “Required”.
Upon first adding the instructor to a section, Department Schedulers will need to enter the instructor details modal and hit “save”. No edits will be required; however, hitting “save” is required.
When adding additional meetings, instructors will automatically get those new meeting assignments if they are already associated with the session indicator and the Department Scheduler does not need to click into the instructor details modal. In other words: If you add an additional meeting to session indicator 01, you don’t need to then access the Instructor Roles & Details modal to add that additional meeting if the instructor is already associated with 01.
Additional Notes
If you add two instructors to a section, both instructors will default to primary. If the second instructor should be non-primary, you will need to change that manually.
You should use the “Multiple Primary Instructors” rule to prevent two primary instructors from being assigned before a section is saved. You’ll want to make sure this rule is set to “Cannot be violated” and “Warning”.
Note that the default value is only set when the modal is open, so you need to make Instructor Role required so the user clicks into it, and it is properly checked against the rule.
Make sure the “Instructor Percentage Sum Does Not Equal 100” custom rule is also configured.
Learn more about rules here.
If you notice a red bar above the instructors card as shown below, you will need to click “Set Instructor Roles & Details” and hit “Save” in the modal that pops up. You may not need to make any adjustments/edits in the modal; however, the action of hitting “Save” is needed.
Allow Duplicate Instructors in Section
With Session Indicator handling enabled, Department Schedulers at Banner schools can add an instructor to a section multiple times (e.g. As primary on one session and non-primary on another).
This involves configuring the “Allow Duplicate Instructors in Section” permission to “Allow”, which Coursedog will handle for you when we enable Session Indicator handling.
“Instructor Assigned to Invalid Session Indicator” Rule
Overview | Rule Violation Flag | Updated Merge Settings
Overview
This rule will be enabled for you as part of activating Section Indicator handling.
This rule prevents users from saving changes that would orphan any instructor(s) within the section. For example: If an instructor is assigned to a meeting with Session Indicator 02, and the Session Indicator on all meetings is then changed to 01, a warning message will be displayed and the user will be unable to save their changes until the instructor has been removed or re-assigned to a valid Session Indicator.
Institutions where meeting session indicator is always 01 and the “session indicator” field has been set to “not editable” will not experience this scenario when building new schedules; however, Coursedog suggests it remain enabled to prevent potential issues as rolled section data might contain non-standard session indicator values.
Rule Violation Flag
In the first screenshot shown below, the instructor would need to have their assigned meeting adjusted.
The second screenshot shows what you’d see when you return to the instructor’s “Set Instructor Roles & Details” settings.
Updated Merge Settings
If your role permissions allow you to view merge settings, you might notice one change as a result of Section Indicator handling: the addition of a custom exception (professorsMeta.$.timeIndex added and set to “Always Coursedog”).
