Has anyone had the need to track courses that were taken from a different school? We regularly have students enrolled in our school take courses at other nearby schools and colleges. This occurs for example, because a student has exhausted our progression of math courses, but wants to take a math course in her Senior year. In this case, they take a course at a local college. Though not uncommon, we don't track the course as a regular course from our school. The information about the course, including final grade, is curently kept in an Access Database, and a special page is produced from this database and included with the student's transcript. I want to move the database into EE - has anyone else figured out how to handle this data in EE? I really don't want to create courses to handle this, as just about every one is different (and we don't need all the intelligence construed by a course), and the data does not fit into Activities. I suppose I could use Attributes, but I would need 5 attributes for each course - Date, Location, Course Name, Grade and Credit. Thanks in advance for your help. Bob Bell Director of Technology Harrisburg Academy

We include notes on our transcript and just keep this outside coursework as a note in the student's record. It is very simple and looks good on the transcript as long as the descriptions are not too long.

This is a problem within the Blackbaud system. We currently create "transfer" courses then add the grades to the appropriate year as needed. We found no other way to do this and have it print correctly on the transcripts. The Transfer courses are very short (3 tabs) and if you use a course or two to copy from it does not take long to set up. The upside is that the student grades are complete and in our system allowing us to print off the transcripts quickly as well as send a complete record to the Georgia Hope Scholarship system ( which requires electronic submission only) The downside is that it can take about 2-4 hours per student to input data and insure it is correct.

We use the same proceduer that Karla Coop uses. We add in the Outside School so that the transcript shows that the courses were not taken at our school. The downside is that it is very tedious to do. We only do transcripts for 9th -12th grade so we only see a dozen or so of these. It gives me something to do in the month of October ;-) Norm Dunkin Director of Information Services Landmark Christian School [Email Removed]

We use the Transfer Courses for regular year coursework for students when they come to us from other schools. I agree it is tedious and populates the database with many one-time courses. For summer coursework and college coursework, we use notes on the transcript.

"The downside is that it can take about 2-4 hours per student to input data and insure it is correct." Boy was I glad to see Karla write that. I thought I was an idiot doing it the hard way when it took me FOREVER to enter transfer courses. We easilly get a couple of dozen transfer students each summer. That's at least a whole week's labor just to enter them into the database. There has to be an easier way. Of course, if the GRADES module wasn't so slow it wouldn't be so bad. Director of Academic Computing Services Pope John XXIII High School Sparta NJ 07871

You might consider using EE's "import" ability to speed things up... Our school just switched over to EE this past year and we are right in the middle or trying to get our historical information from past years into the system. I have to enter the academic history for nearly 2500 students into EE and it is looking like it is not going to be any fun. I sat down one day and figured out exactly what information needs to be present in the database to get the kind of information that we want (for transcripts) and then created "import" templates for each piece that I need. In your cases, you might consider doing the same. That way you would have the file layout for all the information that you needed and you could simply "import" those students and their transfer course information right into EE (all student's at once) rather than having to wait for the VERY slow grades module to catch up with you. It's an idea... // Tim Morrill

One other thing that I do that makes this a little easier. If they take English in the 9th grade, I just give it the same course name that we use. I don't make up a new course name for every transfer course, only the ones that we don't offer. I take every opportunity to keep the number of different course names as low as possible. Norm Dunkin Director of Information Services Landmark Christian School [Email Removed]

I agree totally with Norm - reuse courses as much as possible. In my opinion, EE seems to tend toward a "bloated" database so anything to help keep it under control is a good idea. // Tim Morrill

Tim, It might be worth you while to ask Blackbaud to set up the import for you. We were unable to import both student grades and the courses. The import ID's always gave us problems. [i]--- Edited at 3/16/2007 5:38:52 PM by Karla Coop[/i]

When we went from Rediker to EE a couple of years ago, we hired a Blackbaud consultant to come in and set things up for us to import our historical grades. We set a date and said that anything before that date was historical on Rediker. Anything after that date went into EE. It took two weeks to do the imports, very tedious. Lots of checking and rechecking. I don't remember the process to well but it worked great. Once we got the 6 hour training session with the consultant, we took off on our own. Norm Dunkin Director of Information Services Landmark Christian School [Email Removed]

Just for the record, I have already successfully imported several "test" students' historical courses AND their grades into EE so that they would appear on the transcript in the year they were taken with the school they were taken at. Blackbaud tech support was VERY helpful in helping me figure out how I needed to set up the imports and files, but I did not need to hire them to do anything. All that remains for me to do now is import the "live" data of 2500 students into the system - I foresee no problems. When I have the time, I will zip the files and send them to Blackbaud to put up in the "client documents" portion of their site. Thanks. // Tim Morrill [i]--- Edited at 3/20/2007 2:22:13 PM by Tim Morrill[/i]