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COM-FSM > SIS Documentation > Guides > Class Schedule
Class Schedule
Table of contents
The class schedule describes the list of courses that are available for registration each term. It is based on courses from the Course Catalog and includes scheduling information such as where and when classes meet, and who the instructors are. Prior to building a class schedule, instructor (Faculty) and room information must be defined. Buildings and RoomsInformation on buildings and rooms doesn't change very often, but must be defined before the class schedule can be created. It only needs updated when new buildings or rooms are added, or existing rooms are removed or repurposed. Information on Buildings should be entered first. These records are used to organize rooms by where they are physically located, but don't affect how rooms are assigned. This information is intended to help a student locate a room, so the description should sufficiently describe the building. Building records are organized by campus, so the codes and descriptions don't need to re-state the campus. Each room used for instruction must be defined before it can be assigned to a section. Room data includes campus, the building the room is located in, a description of the room, and its capacity. Much like Building records, rooms records include campus, so the codes used to identify rooms don't need to re-state the campus. The room assigned to a section must be on the same campus as the section. SectionsThe class schedule is built by creating sections, term- and campus-specific instances of courses that students can register for. Each section is identified by a combination of four key values; term, subject, course number, and section number. The subject and course number come directly from the Course Catalog. Section NumberThe section number is used to identify a specific section of a course and should contain a character to indicate what campus the sections is offered at. It is displayed on the registration form when searching for sections, so having an indication for campus helps locate sections appropriate to the student being registered. The field is three characters wide, so section numbers like "01C" or "3P" work well. Section InformationWhen creating new sections (by specifying a section number that hasn't already been defined) information from the Course Catalog will supply default values for title and credits. The title can be modified as needed. Credits can be modified if the course is defined with a range of credit hours. As in the catalog, if the course is offered for a fixed number of credits, Max Credits should be left blank. Status is used to control registration in this section. It defaults to (O) Open, which allows registration. This can be changed to (C) Closed to stop additional registration from occurring (without an override on the Registration form), or (N) Cancelled, which indicates that the section will not be taught. Once a section has been created it can't be deleted, but changing it's status to Cancelled has the same effect. Enrollment Limit defaults to 99 but should be set to a value appropriate for the section. This is not immediately checked against the capacity of the rooms the section is scheduled in, but will show as a warning on the Class Schedule report. If the sections meets outside of the normal term schedule, Start- and End-Date can be specified. If not specified, the start- and end-date for the Term will be used. A Rate should be specified for sections are are assessed tuition at a non-standard Rate. Rate codes must indicate they are valid section rates to be available on this form. Grading ModesIf a course is available for registration in any mode other than graded (A-F), the list of available Grading Modes must be supplied. If no grading modes are listed, the course will only be available as graded (A-F). One record must be indicated as a default grading mode; this default will be used on the Registration form. Meeting Times and InstructorsMeeting times consist of a start- and end time, indicators for each day of the week, the room the section meets in, and the instructor's ID and attributed load. Sections can have multiple meeting times if necessary, e.g. the course meets in one classroom most days, but a lab or other space on another. The start- and end-time are entered in 12-hour time with am/pm. If you enter a time without specifying am or pm the form will make an educated guess of your intent but you should check the times before saving them. The room is identified by its code and will be suggested from rooms on the campus the section has been configured with. Because of this relationship, it isn't possible to enter meeting times until a campus has been specified in the Section Information. The Instructor can be located by name or ID (as with all ID fields) but must be identitfied as an instructor on the Instructor form before their ID will be valid here. Load is a percentage (0-100) and indicates what percentage of this sections hours are counted in this instructors work load. This information is used in the calculations for the Instructor Load report. ReportsOpen SectionsTo monitor enrollment during registration, the Open Sections report is available. It displays a list of sections for a specific term and campus, and can be limited to a specific subject, or to only sections with seats remaining (by checking List only open sections). Sections are listed by Subject, and include credits, meeting information, and enrollment data (maximum allowed, current, and available). Class ScheduleThe Class Schedule report can be used to view a campuses entire schedule of classes or to look for room conflicts. It reports information similar to the Open Sections report, but checks for conflicts between scheduled sections and for rooms schedule for sections that exceed their seating capacity. |