Creating Courses

How to set up your college’s product – courses

In onCourse courses are the product you have created, while classes are what you sell. For more information about the difference between courses, classes and sessions, click here

To create a course

1. Select ‘course’ from the dashboard or menu. This will open the courses window.

2. Click ‘new’ to begin creating a new course.

3. Create a name for your course and a course code. Your course code must be unique (e.g. a code not used by any other course already created). Many colleges develop special codes that have meaning to assist in identifying courses in groups like categories or regions to make them easier to remember and search on and here are some suggestions.

4. If you have created tag groups for courses, add the appropriate tag to your new course. Click the + icon on the tag image and choose your selection from the drop down menu. For courses to display on the website they must be tagged with a subject. All other tags are for internal use only.

5. There are two options for entering descriptions: print brochure description on the general tab, and web description on the web tab. Usually, print materials are limited to descriptions of two or three lines, where on the web, your space is unlimited. If you do not intend to use onCourse to create a print based brochure, you do not need to enter any information in the print brochure description field. Text entered in the web description field can be written in rich text format. A guide to using rich text can be found here. You can preview the text by hovering over the blue A at the bottom of the text field. You can also attach images, files or documents to the web page.

6. To publish your course to the web, tick the ‘show this course on the web’ check box. Remember that a student can not enrol in a course, only a class, so you will need to create classes on your website before students can enrol at your college and start giving you money! Go here for a guide to creating classes.

Setting up Qualification and Unit of Competency information for a course

If you are an RTO who offers short accredited programs, or full qualifications, you will appreciate the ease in which you can set up your courses with the right unit and qualification details, which then flows through to recording outcomes, creating transcripts and certifications, and generating AVETMISS compliant data.

Under the tab VET in the course, you can select the parent qualification and the units from the built in database. If you course is VET, but not from a training package or accredited course, you can also flag it VET here and allocate it’s Field of Education ID.

onCourse does not contain the qualification packaging rules, so it is up to you as the college to ensure that you are compliant with your own scope of registration and the requirements of the training packages you are authorised to deliver. You should refer to these when creating your courses and only select units which are allowed to contribute towards that particular qualification.

The code and name fields are clairvoyant, so will look up qualifications in the built in NTIS database as you type them. You can add units by clicking the + icon. These fields are also clairvoyant.

Adding VET units