Clairvoyance and Quick Enrol

How to enter data and enrol students

onCourse has a powerful data entry tool known as clairvoyance (or ‘type-ahead’) which makes data entry much faster and more accurate. By presenting a list of options to the user as they type, onCourse ensures that only valid choices may be made. For example,

• students are linked to a country of birth (for AVETMISS data collection). Rather than allow the user to type any country or some obscure country code, clairvoyance links the student to official ABS country codes as you type the country name. By auto-completing the text as you type, only a few letters need to be typed to find the right country.
• adding modules (units of competency) to a course can be time consuming and prone to mistakes which then flow onto problems with certificates issued to students, AVETMISS reporting errors and other problems. Clairvoyance solves these neatly, making choosing from close to 30,000 units of competency and modules easy and (almost but not quite) fun.
• In Quick Enrol, clairvoyance is used to enter students to be enrolled. Here, students can be found by first name or last and a new student quickly added without even leaving the window.

Clairvoyance in action: Search for a student in the quick enrol window

How to use clairvoyance

Just start typing. Once you have typed a minimum number of letters (2-3 depending on the context) a list will drop down of possible choices. You can keep typing and the list will shorten as you type, or else you can select an option from the menu with the mouse or the arrow keys. Page down and page up are used to move through the list quickly, and home/end take you to the top or bottom.

As you press backspace the list will get longer again, revealing more options. Only valid choices are available, so inappropriate data can never be entered. If you type rubbish in the field it will clear when you tab out.

When it comes to entering a student, tutor or company, clairvoyance works in even more powerful ways. You can type a person like this:

Lisa Jones

or like this

Jones, Lisa

As you type, clairvoyance automatically tries to detect whether you are typing a first name or last name and gives you appropriate results. You need to pause for at least half a second before clairvoyance tries to search the database (which is helpful when you might have over 100,000 students in your system), but the results are returned very quickly after that.

But I like my mouse

No problem. Everywhere that you see clairvoyance you can also enter data completely with the mouse by dragging that item from another window. For instance, if you have a course list view open and Quick Enrol in another window, you can drag a course line from the list directly onto the course clairvoyance field in an enrolment in Quick Enrol.