Cluster Based Courses

When you enrol students in whole qualifications but deliver courses in clusters

Clusters, in this case, refers to an internal grouping of units of competency that a college delivers to break up a qualification into teaching-focused groups of units. Sometimes one unit from a qualification may be delivered across multiple clusters, and a student must successfully complete the assessments in each cluster to acheive competency in the unit.

For example the Qualification Certificate IV in Training and Assessment has 12 units in total, but the four Environment units are assessed in each cluster. The course is delivered in three clusters and each cluster has a fee that applies to it.

Creating the Qualification

Certificate IV in Training and Assessment – Units of Competency

Following the instructions available here, create a new course and attach all the units that you deliver as part of the qualification. This is the formal enrolment where you will record the student’s completion of outcomes once assessment has been sufficiently completed across your various clusters.

This is the course that you will advertise on your website, so make sure you include the full course description and information about how you deliver the program.

Next, create a class for this course, entering the dates, student fees and venue information. Details on how to create a class is available here. Web enable this class so students can enrol.

You may choose to set up this class as an ‘application fee enrolment’ and advise the students of the full fee within this class description. Do this by setting the class fee as the amount you wish them to pay to apply, and ensure your information explains what the approval process involves. You will need to contact students who apply and inform them of their success or otherwise, and organise payment of the full course fees.

Creating the clusters

Internal cluster, used for scheduling and planning

The cluster courses that you create are for your scheduling and management purposes only. They will not be advertised online, as you will enrol students in these classes as appropriate.

The clusters that you create are not VET courses – do not attach the qualification or units of competency to these records. You can put details of the units and content covered in the description if you wish.

Set up each course and class with the assigned rooms, tutors and sessions

Enrolments and Payment

As onCourse will invoice students class fees, you can allow students to make full payments or part payments at the time of enrolment.

For example, you could set the full fee on the first class and track students as they make payments towards this total amount. Alternatively, you could set up multiple classes with fees attached, so students are only invoiced for a portion of the course fee each time they are enrolled in a new cluster.

In the example below, the full qualification has an application fee of $100, paid online. Once the student’s enrolment has been accepted, they are invoiced $900 for the first cluster, and $500 for each of the subsequent clusters, until a total of $2000 has been paid.

Qualification course for advertising on the web, plus internal classes for cluster based enrolments