Initial Setup

After you have successfully connected onCourse to onCourse Server for the first time, you will see is the General preferences window, opened to the Service tab. The other tabs will govern other behaviours within onCourse such printing reports, being able to send emails, backups. You’ll mostly be able to ignore the majority of these settings to begin with.

General Preferences

Navigate here by clicking on “File” -> “Preferences” -> “General” from the top menu.
The first thing you will be asked to do is name your College, this is the only essential part of all the preferences that needs be set in order to run onCourse.

Services Tab

General Preferences - Services

These fields control the additional services that ish provides for onCourse.

These are not be enabled by default and all options are can safely be ignored for all those people who are not using our additional services in onCourse. onCourse is still fully functional as an enrolment system without these services.

If you are using any additional services, then we will supply you with a user name and password to access the services. More info

Email and SMS Tab

In order to successfully send email messages to students and tutors you will need to correctly configure these settings.

You will need hostname or IP address of the mail server. You will also need a valid email account that will be accepted by that mail server, put this is the “Email from” address. The System Administrator is the address that will appear on the email itself, you should contact your mail administrator to verify that these details.

In the SMS field, this is what the receivers of your SMS messages will see as the sender details. Put in a mobile number for people to reply to or, if you do not have an inbound SMS number, you can input the name of your organisation.

Message Templates Tab

These are templates that are sent for various events such as student enrolment confirmation, tutor reminders, payment failure and payment success as well as few others. You can edit the template to your liking with the help of our trusty pop up menu for more options.

Maintenance Tab

Control how often and where your data is backed up. You’ll start seeing onCourseBackup_00XXX.zip files. Restoring is as simple as stopping onCourse Server, unzipping onCourseBackup_00XXX.zip and replacing your current onCourse.iocdata directory.

AVETMISS Tab

These are your organisations details that will be used for all AVETMISS exports. Enter your NTIS id in the field ’Identifier’. You can also choose to limit your staff to creating courses only from pre-approved units and qualifications that you mark within onCourse as ’offered’. To use this feature, flag those you are approved to deliver in the qualifications and module/units table.

Printing Tab

The various reports that can be printed by onCourse are enabled/disabled within this interface, and also allows the addition of custom reports.

Financial Preferences

Navigate here by clicking on “File” -> “Preferences” -> “Financial” from the top menu.

The defaults should be fine here, and check that the default currency is what you wish it to be.

Tag Preferences

onCourse: Editing Tags within a Tag Group

Tags can be created and added by navigating to “File” -> “Preferences” -> “Tags”. This will bring up a list of Tag groups. Tags are flexible ways for you to categorise your data and organise the navigation of your website. More about how tags work on you website is available here 1131. You can create a Tag group which may contain any number of arbitrary tags, choose to which pieces of information such as Courses, Classes, Students ect, that you wish to apply it to, whether it’s mandatory for all records to have a tag, and if you want to limiting each record to only one tag from within this tag group.

This screenshot shows the Tag group called “Subjects” and how you can add any number of tags within this group.

More information on how you can use tagging can be found in the Tagging section of our support section.

Custom fields

Custom fields in contact record

You can create custom fields for contacts which are searchable. This allows you to create fields for, and record information that is particular to your business. Some examples of how this field may be used are payroll numbers, licence numbers, student numbers that stay with the student between training organisations and date of initial contact. These fields can be made mandatory. You can add as many additional fields as you need to, that apply to contacts. These fields will appear on the bottom of the ’general’ tab in each contacts record.

This image shows three custom fields, ’Student ID’, ’Payroll number’ and ’Date of contact’.

Users

Add the names, user names and passwords for each onCourse user. There are no limit to the number of users in onCourse. Users can be deactivated if they leave your organisation.

Access Rights

Enrolment Officer Access Rights

Access rights restrict what parts of onCourse users can modify, print, view or delete. This is an advanced feature, available for onCourse Enterprise customers. Four pre-defined user roles are available within the system, Enrolment Officer, Administration Manager, Course Manager and Financial Manager. You can modify these and create new access rights groups as needed. Each user within your organisation can be given Admin access rights (full access) or be added to any of your access groups. Select the access rights when creating or editing user profiles, as above.

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