Key Concepts
All Course Creator feature instances host the same data. Each feature instance will behave identically. That is, throughout your system, any occurrence of the Course Creator feature can be used to manage any portal-only course, section, department, or term that might be defined. Similarly, there are no instance-specific permissions associated with Course Creator. Every occurrence of the feature in your system should behave in exactly the same manner.
The Course Creator feature has two possible views: default and maximized.
The default view of the feature shows controls you can use to create portal-only courses and portal-only course sections. It includes a link labeled View Current Courses. Clicking this link maximizes the feature.
When you maximize the Course Creator feature, the feature by default displays the following:
In the upper part of the feature, a series of controls that let you work with portal-only courses, course sections, departments, and terms.
In the main body of the feature, a list of departments, courses, and course sections. In some ways, this view varies based on how you set the Select a Term drop-down list. The list includes:
An alphabetical list of departments. The following departments are listed:
ERP departments that are associated with portal-only course sections that takes place in the currently selected term.
All portal-only departments (regardless of whether they are associated with portal-only course sections in the selected term—all are listed).
Under each listed department, the feature lists any course associated with a portal-only course section that takes place in the currently selected term and, under the course, the appropriate course section(s) are listed.
If you are allowed to take any actions on any of the elements listed, the system marks the item with a downward-arrow icon. You can click the icon to display a pop-up box that lists actions you can take.
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As noted in subsequent sections in this chapter, for each portal-only element that you can create, you must assign it a code. These codes are defined when you create the elements, and they cannot be modified later. For this reason, your school may want to define acceptable protocols for these codes before faculty members begin creating portal-only elements.
Note also that portal-only departments and courses are sometimes listed alongside those that were created in the ERP system, and this distinction may not be immediately evident in some cases. For this reason, you may want to create a protocol for codes that denotes portal-only elements as being just that, such as mandating that the last two characters in each course code be “-O” for “online.”