Courses

How Do I Create a Course Catalog?
In SchoolDESX, a Course record represents an area of study offered from your school and is also the corner stone to basically all functions within this software package. This area of study can be broken down to many levels depending on how detailed a school’s curriculum needs to be when offering Enrollments to Students. For example, a Course record could simply be Cosmetology I. Though, it may take a series of Courses to define a Student’s curriculum, such as Skin Analysis I, Manicures I & II, Hair Removal, etc.

When determining how to break down your Course records, the decision as to whether or not the Course record will be need to be scheduled for Student Enrollments must be made (Scheduling a Course means that Attendance will be tracked per subject). Another determining factor is whether or not the Course needs to appear as curriculum taken on a Student’s transcript. In other words, if a Student’s transcript need to show:

In this example, only two Course records will need to be created; Cosmetology I and Cosmetology II, if in fact, these are the only two items that will need scheduled for Student Enrollments. However, if more detail is needed to appear on a Student’s transcript, and each Course will also be scheduled to be taken by a Student separately, then a break down of these two items is necessary, such as:

Remember, this second example can be offered using a combination of Course records and Competency records. In other words, the Course record could store “Cosmetology” and the Competency records could breakdown and store information about each subject (Skin Analysis, Manicures, Hair Removal, etc.) within that Course.

What are Course Prerequisites and Should They Be Used?
Some Courses within a curriculum require that a Student has completed other Courses, whether or not within the same curriculum, prior to attempting this particular Course. These Courses that must be completed before a Student attempts this Course record is referred to as a “Prerequisite”. SchoolDESX has the capability to track a Student’s Enrollments letting the User know if a Student has not yet completed a prerequisite Course before Enrolling into a Course that requires one. It is better to create Course records in a series beginning with the Courses that are lower in level within a curriculum. This will allow the Course records that would become prerequisites to other Courses to be entered first, cutting back on setup time. Course Prerequisites are not required. If they are not needed in your curriculum, please continue to the next section.

However, if prerequisites are mandated by your program’s curriculum, it is important to discuss a particular feature of the Course Prerequisite page. This feature is the Condition field for a particular prerequisite Course. The Condition field is a User modifiable Lookup List that holds predefined values that will be given to each prerequisite Course to define the value that must be met before a Student can attempt the Course record at hand. Different Course Prerequisite Conditions can be entered into the Lookup List and can be marked as a “Required” type, or a “Suggested” type. The “Required” types will display a message to the User when they attempt to enroll a Student into a Course with a prerequisite that has not been met.