Courses, classes, modules and sessions, oh my!

Making sense of all these windows.

There do seem like an awfully large number of related concepts all related to “course”. Do we need them all?

AVETMISS information

Firstly, there are a set of three menu items which open a window each:

• Training packages
• Accredited Courses/Qualifications
• Modules/Units of Competency

These represent AVETMISS (NTIS) concepts. They come pre-populated with data and you cannot edit them except to flag records as being ones you offer. When the data needs updating, ish is able to update a central database which is then polled every so often by your copy and onCourse and the data updated. This is done to save you time and ensure your AVETMISS reports are accurate.

If you don’t understand the above section, chances are that you don’t report AVTEMISS and you can safely ignore them completely.

Your information

Next we have another three concepts in onCourse:

• Courses
• Classes
• Sessions

With version 0.3, sessions were not used. Sessions were introduced in 0.4 along with the calendar and scheduling system. A session represents the individual meeting between a tutor and the students in a particular room on a particular date and time. A class is made up of one or more sessions: a student enrols in a class. In turn classes are grouped into courses which represent a particular description and subject.

So for example:

• Course: Silver Jewelery Making for beginners
  • Class 1: starts 1/4/2007 at 10am with tutor Joanne Smith
  • Class 2: starts 6/5/2007 at 2pm with tutor George Jones
    Each class has 4 sessions, one per week for a month.

In addition, in the Class windows, the Timetable tab and sessions have no connection with start date/end date and time in the General tab for classes, and are independent systems. ie. Changing the start date/end date in the General tab will not create sessions in the Timetable tab and adding/removing sessions will not alter the start date and time.

Why have courses?

Courses are very useful concepts. They allow your web site or printed brochure to collect similar classes together and display them under one heading. You may run the same one day class every week for 52 weeks a year. Your printed material or web site should be able to represent this in a clear way that doesn’t involve a list of 52 separate classes.
Courses allow you to report budgets and profits based on the course, not just at a class level.
Waiting lists are dependent on courses – a student is waiting for a place to become available not in a specific class but in a course.
Courses are also a neat way to link AVETMISS information without having to repeat it for each class.