Table of Contents
Overview
Saving this Page as a PDF
Academic Scheduling Overview
Logging In
Homepage
Templates
Scheduling Terms
Meeting Patterns
Users
Roles
Future Actions
Phases
Departments
Requests
Workflows
Schoolwide Saved Views
Rooms
Buildings
Rules
Relationships
Section Optimizer
Reports
Effective Dating
SIS Integration Overview, Maintenance, and Best Practices
Help & Support
Additional Information
Overview
This guide is intended to help Academic Scheduling admins get their environment ready for end users (e.g. Department Schedulers).
Every section of this guide includes a high-level “Overview” for the listed feature.
The “Learn More” section includes links to more detailed articles and videos.
Some sections include additional sub-sections, broken down by topic.
Saving this Page as a PDF
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Academic Scheduling Overview
Overview
Coursedog's Academic Scheduling platform helps your institution create optimized schedules without spreadsheets or back and forth emails.
Academic Scheduling helps you offer the right courses, seats, and sections; enforce scheduling policies at the department level; gather faculty preferences; eliminate scheduling conflicts; and automatically make the perfect room assignments.
Learn More
Logging In
Overview
Log into Coursedog at app.coursedog.com with your institutional email address and password.
If you haven’t been fully implemented yet and/or are testing configurations, go to staging.coursedog.com (your “Sandbox”).
If your institution is using single-sign-on (SSO), you will be redirected to your institution’s login page.
Learn More
Visit Logging Into Coursedog to learn more about supported browsers, ways to log in, and logging out.
Homepage
Overview
After logging into Coursedog, you will be directed to either a product menu (if you have multiple Coursedog products and haven’t defined a default product) – where you can click “Scheduling” – or you will be taken directly to the Academic Scheduling Homepage.
Homepage Anatomy
Three Lines – Regardless of your location in the platform, you can select the three parallel lines in the upper-left corner to view the main menu.
Name/Logo – Regardless of your location in the platform, you can select the logo/Your Institution’s Name to return to the home page.
Left-Hand Nav – Use the main menu on the left to navigate between the different modules.
Resources Widget – Click this to search our help center for articles or to submit a support ticket without leaving our platform.
Help Center – This will open our help center in a new tab.
Notification Center – Click here to view any requests where you’re a participant.
Grid/Coursedog Product Navigation – If your institution has purchased additional Coursedog products, you can navigate to them here. As an administrator you may also have access to the Admin console from here.
User Profile – Navigate here to view your Account Settings (this is helpful if you want to change your name, password, default term, default views, and notification preferences) or Log Out.
Timeline – This timeline contains key dates for the current scheduling term, including Future Actions, managed by Coursedog Administrator(s).
Departmental Status – This section of the home page provides a high-level overview of departments you are associated with.
Settings – The settings option in the left-hand navigation is generally where admins go to configure their environment.
Learn More
See how the timeline works here.
Read about our notification center.
See our In-App Help article for a breakdown of all available help options.
Learn more about monitoring departmental status.
Templates
PATH: Academic Scheduling > Settings > Templates
Overview
Our powerful, dynamic form builder allows administrators to create templates that define how the section, instructor, room, and course modals will show up to the end users who ultimately fill out the information.
Although our form builder works the same way for all templates in all Coursedog products, the available fields and question settings will vary from template to template.
Field options in the template are customizable, allowing admins to determine which are hidden or visible, editable or locked, and more.
Generally speaking, your field options will have been configured to your institution’s needs during the onboarding process, but it is possible they will need some maintenance term to term (specifically for any fields that have term-based permissioning set-up, unless you have configured “Phases” to manage these changes).
Learn More
Go here for a breakdown of all of the different reports.
See a list of all exportable reports, included fields and use cases for each, here.
Learn more about using these reports for scheduling planning here.
Scheduling Terms
PATH: Academic Scheduling > Settings > Terms
Overview
Use this page to define the term that is currently active on campus (“Current Active Term”), the term you’re currently scheduling for (“Current Scheduling Term”) and Semester Names.
Terms work across our platform, so terms in Academic Scheduling align with Curriculum Management and Catalog.
To update listed terms, click the values in the gray bar below, and a dropdown menu will appear.
If your term isn't listed, make sure Coursedog is connected to your SIS and configured correctly.
Click “Add Term” to create a new term.
Click “Show historical terms” to view terms that have been marked as historical. If a term is "historical", then it will NOT show up in drop-down options throughout the app, nor will it show up in reports.
Learn More
Go here for help defining terms, parts of term, date exceptions, and conversion dates.
Our FAQs article captures common term-related questions.
Check out our Section Template Start & End Dates article to see how you can have start and end dates for sections default from the term.
Meeting Patterns
PATH: Academic Scheduling > Settings > Meeting Patterns
Overview
A meeting pattern, or timeblock, is a combination of days and times that can be assigned to an academic course section.
You can have both standard (designated timeblocks) and custom (any meeting pattern that doesn’t qualify as standard at your institution) meeting patterns.
You can group together standard meeting patterns based on common characteristics so that you can enforce what types of sections are allowed to be scheduled with those meeting patterns. Groups have default meeting days and lengths.
Meeting patterns can be added in bulk via CSV during implementation.
Learn More
Setting Up Meeting Patterns walks you through adding, editing, and uploading meeting patterns.
Integrated customers can learn how to set up TBA Standard Meetings here.
FAQs & Troubleshooting captures common questions and solutions.
Learn how to Assign Meeting Patterns.
Users
PATH: Academic Scheduling > Settings > Users
Overview
There are two ways to add users to your Coursedog environment:
Manually in-app at Scheduling > Settings > Users.
Via a CSV upload (requires Coursedog support).
Learn More
Watch our Setting Up Users video tutorial.
You can find detailed instructions on adding, inactivating, editing, and deleting users in our Setting Up Users article.
Roles
PATH: Academic Scheduling > Settings > Roles
Overview
Academic Scheduling comes loaded with several prebuilt roles.
You can create additional custom roles to suit your institution’s needs.
Role-based permissions dictate what users are able to see and do in the platform. For example, a Department Scheduler should have different access than an Administrator in the Registrar's Office.
You can assign different permissions to different roles and then assign a role to each user.
Learn More
Watch our Setting Up Roles video tutorial.
You can find detailed instructions on creating, assigning, and editing roles in our Setting Up Roles article.
Our Different Role Based Permissions article lists all potential role permissions; explains what each one does; and includes recommended settings.
Go here for Role Configuration Best Practices.
Check out our RBAC Overview walkthrough.
Future Actions
PATH: Academic Scheduling > Settings > Roles
Overview
The same place you configure roles is where you can also set up “Future Actions”.
Future Actions functionality acts as a one-time trigger to change permission settings on a certain date. Best practice is to set up permission changes in phases and then assign the applicable phase to your Future Action(s).
Phases can be reused from term to term, but an admin will need to set up new Future Actions for every term/scheduling cycle.
Example use cases include cutting off access to section editing on a certain date, or granting access to editing at the start of term scheduling.
You can create an email to associate with each future action. That email will be sent to designated recipients on the scheduled date.
As noted above under “Homepage”, Future Actions will always display on the timeline at the top of the Departmental Status table.
Learn More
The Future Actions section of our Roles article outlines use cases and walks you through setup, activation, and deletion.
Learn more about phases below.
Phases
PATH: Academic Scheduling > Settings > Phases
Overview
As your scheduling cycle progresses, you might want to increasingly limit who can make changes (and to what). You can use Phases to accomplish this.
A “phase” is a combination of role and field permissions that can be associated with terms as your scheduling cycle changes.
Once phases are set up, they won’t take effect until you either assign them to a term OR assign them to Future Actions.
If assigned to a term, you will need to change the assigned phase as your scheduling cycle progresses.
If assigned to a Future Action, changes will be automatically applied on a predefined date.
Phases do not change the default configuration of role and field permissions. This allows for active scheduling in more than one term with different permission settings when needed.
Learn More
Configuring and Managing Scheduling Phases explains what phases are, how they work, how to set them up, and includes example configurations.
Departments
PATH: Academic Scheduling > Settings > Departments
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.
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.
Learn More
Our Adding & Editing Departments article provides step-by-step instructions.
Requests
PATH: Academic Scheduling > Requests
Overview
Within settings, this path is where you go to determine which workflow is associated with section change requests.
All requests can be tracked using the Requests Dashboard.
This dashboard replaces in-person, email, and phone requests, and allows all requests to be securely stored in a single location.
You can filter and sort this dashboard and save your view so you don’t have to recreate it later.
There are two types of requests in Scheduling: Rule Exception and Section Change.
Once a request is submitted, it goes through an approval workflow (as outlined above).
Learn More
For step-by-step guidance when creating a request, go to the Requests Dashboard and click “+ Create Request”. A pop-up should appear, asking you if you’d like help creating your request. If the pop-up doesn’t appear, you can access the flow in the In-App Guides widget instead (shown on the far right in the above screenshot).
Go here for an overview of the Requests Dashboard, including how it’s set up, viewing request details, and filtering and saving views.
Learn how you and end users can edit requests here.
See how requests work for both Department Schedulers and Admins in this walkthrough.
Workflows
PATH: Academic Scheduling > Settings > Workflows
Overview
Workflows allow requests to be routed to the right person(s) for approval.
Common examples of requests that will trigger a workflow in Academic Scheduling are section change requests and rule exception requests.
Workflow participants can be notified via email whenever a request is routed to them; admins can customize those notifications.
Workflow Notifications
Default Workflow Notifications can be found and edited at Academic Scheduling > Settings > Workflow Notifications. Every workflow will be automatically populated with these notifications.
If you don’t want to use the default Workflow Notification for a particular workflow, you can edit it within the workflow at Academic Scheduling > Settings > Workflows > (Select Workflow) > Edit Workflow.
Some emails can be configured at the step level (meaning they are workflow-specific and step-specific); those can be edited at Academic Scheduling > Settings > Workflows > (Select Workflow) > (Select Step) > Edit Email Templates.
Learn More
For step-by-step guidance through workflow creation, go to Academic Scheduling > Settings > Workflows and click “+Add Approval Workflow”. A pop-up should appear, asking you if you’d like help creating your workflow. If the pop-up doesn’t appear, you can access the flow in the In-App Guides widget instead.
Watch our Workflows & Workflow Notifications video tutorial.
Our Creating, Editing, Duplicating & Deleting Workflows article contains step-by-step instructions.
See how to assign workflows to different request types.
See how and where you can edit Workflow Notifications here.
Common workflow questions are in our FAQs & Troubleshooting article.
Schoolwide Saved Views
PATH: Academic Scheduling > Settings > Schoolwide Saved Views
Overview
Schoolwide Saved Views are “Saved Views” that an admin can make accessible to different roles.
These views are accessible to users, as defined by the admin, via the “Saved Views” option.
Learn More
See Default and Schoolwide Saved Views for a saved views glossary and instructions on defining views.
Rooms
PATH: Academic Scheduling > Rooms
Overview
Optimally configuring and organizing your room inventory is very important for you to get the most out of Academic Scheduling. Most of this will be set up during onboarding.
You can import rooms via your SIS; in bulk using this CSV; or manually in the UI.
The rooms you add and the settings you configure for each will help Department Schedulers find the right room for each section.
How you set up the Room Template (Scheduling > Settings > Templates > Room Template) will impact available Room Settings (Scheduling > Rooms > Select Room).
You can restrict room availability based on a role or term via the Section Template’s “Meeting Patterns & Rooms” card; or based on course, department, or other criteria using “allowed sections”.
You can lock rooms to prevent them from being scheduled (and then release them later).
You can also block out times when rooms shouldn’t be scheduled.
Learn More
Learn more about Setting Up Rooms.
See how to configure the Room Template.
Check out our Room FAQs.
Buildings
PATH: Academic Scheduling > Buildings
Overview
Buildings will come in with the integration.
Just as you can block out times for individual rooms, you can also block out times for all rooms in a given building.
If a user is assigning rooms to a section and the section time overlaps with a building’s blocked out times, then rooms in that building won’t show up in the list of available rooms.
Rules
PATH: Academic Scheduling > Rules
Overview
Admins can create Section Rules and Meeting Pattern rules for Department Schedulers to abide by.
Section Rules
Coursedog comes preloaded with several default Section Rules, but you can create Custom Section Rules to suit your institution’s needs.
Rule exceptions can be used to exclude specific departments or sections from a Section Rule that does not apply to them.
Meeting Pattern Rules
Meeting Pattern Rules are used to identify overused meeting patterns during certain times of the schedule.
There are two types of Meeting Pattern Rules: attribute-based and time-based.
Learn More
Watch our video tutorial on Section Rules.
For step-by-step guidance when creating a custom Section Rule, go to Section Rules and click “+ New Rule”. A pop-up should appear, asking you if you’d like help creating your workflow. If the pop-up doesn’t appear, you can access the flow in the In-App Guides widget instead.
Our Setting Up Rules article provides detailed information about both Section Rules and Meeting Pattern Rules.
Check out our Academic Scheduling Rule/Policy Enforcement walkthrough.
Relationships
PATH: Academic Scheduling > Relationships
Overview
Coursedog’s Relationship Dashboard is used for managing relationships between sections. For example, two sections can have a non-overlapping relationship which means they cannot be scheduled during overlapping meeting times.
Coursedog offers many different types of linked section relationships as well as cross-listed relationships; however, which ones you can use and what they’re called in your UI can vary by SIS.
Access to the Relationship Dashboard is managed by Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC). You can determine which roles have access to this tool by adjusting permissions at Scheduling > Settings > Roles > (Select Role) > Relationships.
Learn More
See Setting Up Section Relationships for an overview of relationship types, setup, and integration considerations.
Go here for PeopleSoft-specific directions.
Banner schools should reference Enabling, Configuring & Creating Linked Sections in Banner.
Reference Different Relationship Permissions to see the different RBAC and field-level permissions for relationships.
Check out our troubleshooting article.
Section Optimizer
PATH: Academic Scheduling > Optimizer > Section Optimizer
Overview
The Section Optimizer can be used to automatically make the best room assignments for an academic schedule.
We don’t recommend running the optimizer until after you’ve had at least one term successfully scheduled in Coursedog.
This is because the focus of the initial Scheduling go-live should be on product adoption, user comfort, and a successful end-user experience.
Additionally, the optimizer is highly dependent on the inputs it has, and those inputs are more likely to be configured properly if you’ve had at least one successful scheduling term.
Run the optimizer 3+ weeks before your schedule must be finalized to give yourself time to make any necessary adjustments.
Before running the Optimizer, make sure Room Settings, Section Preferences, and Instructor Preferences (if your institution uses them) have been thoroughly configured.
You will also need to assign Meeting Patterns to sections before running the Optimizer (it won’t assign rooms to sections if the section doesn’t already have a meeting pattern assigned).
Once you’ve run the Optimizer, you can view results and resolve errors before merging results.
Learn More
Using the Section Optimizer for Rooms provides a detailed overview of necessary configurations along with directions for creating an optimizer run, resolving conflicts and bottlenecks, and merging results.
That article also includes a training guide at the bottom of the article (it’s attached as a PDF).
Our FAQs article captures common questions and troubleshooting solutions.
Reports
PATH: Academic Scheduling > Reports
Overview
Coursedog provides a wide variety of out-of-box reports to help analyze sections, conflicts, instructors, times, departments, rooms, bottlenecks, and enrollment.
Reports can serve as a useful reference during schedule planning.
The Reports Dashboard includes the option to export many different reports (typically in CSV format).
Learn More
Go here for a breakdown of all of the different reports.
See a little of all exportable reports, included fields, and use cases for each here.
Learn more about using these reports for scheduling planning here.
Check out our Reports walkthrough (and this one specific to Space Utilization).
Effective Dating
Overview
If your school is integrated and utilizes Coursedog's Curriculum Management product, then you will be able to leverage Effective Dating.
In Curriculum and Catalog, effective dating creates a system of revisions and versions for each curriculum object (course, program, and document type) that can be accessed within other Coursedog applications. This allows users to create and edit objects in present and future date ranges, while also creating multiple versions of those objects for each date range, allowing a school to seamlessly manage different versions of the same object.
Revisions are created when there’s an edit to a course/program/document type and the user sets an effective start date or start term for the change to take effect, so long as a revision does not already exist for that range.
Versions are created when there’s an edit to a course/program/document type where the effective dates or terms are not modified or wherever a revision with the same effective dates or terms already exists.
When importing a course from Curriculum Management, the current term’s start date will be applied, and available courses will be filtered to match the Effective Start Date. This means it will pull the matching revision that fits the term dates.
Learn More
Go here to see how Effective Dating works in Curriculum and Catalog.
Effective Dating comes in handy when Scheduling Multiple Terms.
See how Effective Dating impacts Instructors.
See how Effective Dating impacts Departments.
See some limitations around room effective dating.
SIS Integration Overview, Maintenance, and Best Practices
Overview
If your institution’s Student Information System (SIS) has a planned outage, you should disable your Coursedog integration prior to the start of maintenance to avoid any errors.
We recommend that you keep your staging environment up to date.
Use the end or start of a new term as a point in your process to ensure data, settings, etc. in your staging environment is up to date and not stale.
Out-of-date staging environments can lead to false confidence when testing new features, new integration enhancements/scripts, etc. If your business practices, processes, etc. have changed, the tests run in stage will not be reflective of the environment rolled out in production.
It’s important to review merge reports regularly (after nightly syncs or once a week during active scheduling) to catch and resolve issues.
Learn More
Ongoing Maintenance FAQs answer common questions that pop up as new customers near the end of their implementation.
Handling Client-Scheduled Maintenance walks you through how you can disable your integration prior to maintenance.
The Integrations & Technical section of our Knowledge Base speaks to integration basics and includes integration overviews by SIS.
Managing Your Integration provides an overview of merge error types, best practices, guidance on when to submit a support ticket, and ways to review merge errors.
Common merge error FAQs are in our troubleshooting article.
Check out our Integration Dashboard walkthrough.
Help & Support
Overview
You can search our Knowledge Base, submit a support ticket, and check the status of an existing ticket at coursedog.freshdesk.com.
If you’re in-app and have a question, you don’t need to open a new browser tab – you can also submit a support ticket and search for articles from within our app via the “Resources” widget in the upper right-hand corner of your screen.
There are tooltips throughout Academic Scheduling. If you see an “i” icon, hover over it for a tooltip that explains related functionality and often links to a help article.
Learn More
The Customer Support section of our knowledge base includes several articles that speak to in-app help, how our help center works, submitting and monitoring tickets, how product releases work, and more.
Additional Information
This guide is for admins setting up their platform. Additional guides are available for admins preparing for a new term as well as Department Schedulers.