Course Request Options

1. Enter as much criteria as is necessary to find the student for which you are looking.

2. Click Search.

3. Find your student's name in the resultant list (scroll forward or add additional search criteria if necessary) and click his or her name.

1. If the student belongs to a House (that you must have previously set up through the related step/lesson), you may select it from the drop-down menu and Save it. Students within the same house will be scheduled with teachers/sections that belong to the same house.

2. To acquire a list of courses from which to add course requests for the student, use any Course.

Search criteria by which you'd like to filter courses, then click Search.

Any courses that have been requested will show with the green 'Requested' box next to the course name. To add a course from the list to the student's schedule, double-click the desired course on the left, and it will then appear on the right.

• If a course request was assigned through a Package, a lock icon will appear in the top right and the name of the package will appear underneath.
• If a course request was requested through the Online Student Portal, a cloud icon will appear in the top right.

If there is an alternate course request that will work just as well as another (but should not be added to a schedule in addition to another - such as 2 alternate choices for one Elective spot), drag and drop the desired course on the left (place your mouse cursor over it, "left-click" once but hold the click down) to the similar course already-selected on the right (still holding the click down, move your mouse cursor over the alternate selection until it turns blue, as shown above, and then let go of the mouse).

The alternate course will then appear on the right, as shown above. You may add additional alternate courses, or delete an alternate course (or the request number that houses it) at any time by clicking the blue X icon next to it.

1. To Edit a Course Request, select Edit.

2. This will populate Terms (select the one you want it to apply to), Timeblocks (Periods), Teacher and Priority of the Course Request.

The Student Scheduler uses Course Request priorities as a guide for placing students initially. When the scheduler encounters conflicts it will try to shuffle students around with less emphasis on priorities as it looks for a solution. The ultimate goal of the scheduler is to place 100% of course requests in the allotted time. A Priority 1 isn't a guarantee that a course request will be satisfied.

3. Click Save.

To delete a course request:

1. Click the blue X icon.

2. You will be asked to confirm the deletion, select Yes. The Course Request will disappear from the list.

Data-informed Student Groups, in combination with Course Request Packages, become a powerful tool in data-informed program placement. The central tenant of data-informed program placement is the use of timely and accurate date to place students in the course and section that will meet their learning needs.

STEP 1: Create Custom Reports that use multiple data points to identify students for advanced, alternate, and support courses.  See Data Informed Program Placement and Custom Reports for more nformation. The advantage to this method is that Custom Reports leverage live data. As student data updates and changes, it can influence scheduling in real time.

STEP 2: Link each Custom Report to a Student Group. Click here for more information.

STEP 3: Use the data-informed Student Groups to assign course requests through packages. Student Groups can be used to create a package or as an exclusion group. Dynamic, multi-faceted student data can now  inform program placement in a systematic way.

1. Enter a name by which you can later identify the package (such as a short description on the type of student to which it applies).  These packages are typically named by grade level ex: 6th Grade, 7th Grade, 8th Grade etc.

2. Select the appropriate student group from the drop-down menu.

3. Click Submit.

1. Select the Courses tab.

2. Select Add Course from the dropdown menu and click the > button.

3. Select a course you want to add to the package (so that every student assigned to the package receives this course in his or her schedule).

4. The priority for course requests created via the package can also be set here. The default value is 1, but you may alter it if you like for less-crucial course selections.

5. If this is a year-long course, you should leave the default (Auto Select) selected. If the student can take the course in any term, the default (Auto Select) should be selected. Only select the term when a single-term course must be taken in a specific term by all students in the package.

6. To add more courses, click the + button.

7. Click Submit.

1. Note that you may delete any course you no longer want by clicking the box next to the course name then selecting Remove Course from the dropdown menu. Click the > button to complete.

If you want to exclude a particular group of students from receiving a specific course within the Package this package of course requests,

3. Select the check box next to the course from which you wish to exclude a specific student group.

4. Select Add Exclusion from the dropdown menu and click the > button.

5. Select the desired group from the Select a Group dropdown.

6. Click Submit. The exclusion group will show in the 'Exclusions' column. You can exclude more than one student group per course if you wish.

To remove this group, simply click on the check box next to the group name and click Remove Exclusion.

1. To edit a package, select the Pencil/Paper icon.

2. To delete a package, select the red Trash Can icon.

Importing Course Requests can be a useful option for school sites that choose to collect course requests outside of Illuminate. Data files can be created in Excel or Google Sheets and easily imported.

1. The import file must be in a tab-delimited or comma-delimited format. The Course Request import tool does not take Excel (xls, xlsx) formats.

2. Student ID is the only requirement. Courses are match based on the School Course ID (not Short Name or Long Name).  Additional columns (Student name, grade level, etc.) can be included in the file for user convenience, but are not used in the import and matching process.

3. There is no limit to the number of course requests a student can have.  The example shows 7 requests per student, but you can add as many columns of requests as needed.

4.  The priority orders start from the leftmost column and moves rightward.  In this example, "YR Course 1" = P1, "YR Course 2" = P2...."S2 Course 6" = P7.

5. For term-specific requests (i.e. a student can only take Woodshop course in S1), ensure they those term specific requests remain as separate columns.  In the example, Nicole Garcia has a specific request to get course 4000 in S1.  When you get to the Import Course request mapping page, there you will be able to align what columns are specific to a term. Create a separate column for S2 course requests and a third for auto-select course requests.

6. Alternate Courses

• a.  Alternates require you use brackets around the courses (i.e. [3000|4000|5000]).  Between each course, you must delimit the courses using the pipe character (Shift + backward slash "\" on keyboard).
• b. The first course in the bracketed list is the primary course for that priority.  In this example, course 3000 is the primary course request for P6.
• c. The trailing courses (delimited by the pipe character) after the primary course are the alternates. In this example, course 4000(Alternate P1) and 5000(Alternate P2) are the alternates for P5, should the student not get course 3000.