Get the New Year off to a good start and set up Online Course Requests and Enrollments

Nate Hall — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:40:00 GMT

Happy New Year! I bet many of you have made New Year’s resolutions to be more efficient, and one of the biggest time-saving features for Education Edge users is the ability to let students request or even fully enroll in classes for the coming year. Through NetClassroom, schools can allow their students and parents to take a look at the classes which are available and then enter these requests. This could potentially save you dozens or even hundreds of man hours against sorting through stacks of paper course requests or wading through emails to find the courses each student wants to take, and then scheduling and entering each request.

Sounds like a spectacular feature, right? “Now how do I get started?” you ask. Believe it or not, something this time-saving is just as easy to setup. In Registrar’s Office, click Configuration, and then click NetClassroom. First things first: check out the Features section and make sure the Registration checkbox is marked for relations and/or students, depending on your school’s particular setup. Without this checkbox marked, any other setup is useless because the Online Course Request feature will not be available to NetClassroom users.

The next step is to go to the Registration Setup section and take a look at the display options and the scheduling exceptions that are checked when students enter requests/enrollments. Marking all of the exceptions can be helpful in keeping students fully informed about why they are not allowed to request a course and making sure the students know exactly which courses they will take when they are finished with the online registration process.

The biggest section in Registration Setup is where the meat of the setup process takes place. This area is where you determine which classes are available to register for each school, academic year, and session. The first screen after you click New contains the most basic setup options, such as what you want to enable for each school, session, and academic year combination. Only one setup is allowed for each combination, meaning that the students will either request courses or enroll directly into classes; you can’t have them do both.

At the bottom of the Setup screen, you can add a New Group. The groups added here allow you to group students and select the classes they can register for. For example, you may want to have one group for each grade level so the seniors are not seeing freshman English as an option, even though I’m sure seniors would love to be able to take freshman English again for credit (seriously, who wouldn’t want the easy A?). The bottom of the Group screen allows users to further group the classes to require the students to select from a group of courses. One option I can think of would be to have a row setup for each type of class. This would go something like this:

One row for the English requirement set up to say ‘Please select an English class’ and the row would include a selection of AP English, Honors English IV, or English IV
One row for the Quantitative Reasoning requirement set up to say ‘Please select a class from the following’ and the classes available would be AP Calculus AB, AP Calculus BC (FYI, one of my personal favorite classes when I was in high school), AP Statistics, Discrete Mathematics, Introduction to String Theory (for the over-achievers).
One row for the History requirement set up to say ‘Please select a History class’ and the available classes would be AP US History (another favorite), AP European History, Chinese History, Honors World History.
And so on and so forth, kind of like this:

Another possibility is setting up the registration to allow students to enter 6 requests but only set up 3 rows as above. The students would then be able to enter 3 more requests from any of the available courses as electives in a section that displays in NetClassroom as ‘Additional requests.’

Anyhoo, that is a brief rundown of setting up Online Course Requests (whew). For more information, I’d recommend checking out Knowledgebase solution BB262304. I’ll also check back periodically to answer any brief questions you may have, but you’ve got to post them as a reply to my post. Be sure to check back periodically for more from the Bookbag!

The Book Bag : online course requests

Get the New Year off to a good start and set up Online Course Requests and Enrollments