This lesson comprises part of student scheduling and covers the process of entering information about the courses that each student will be taking in the upcoming school year. This approach is typically used by high school sites (where each student sits down with a counselor to discuss the coming school year) in place of scheduling groups or packages; however, all site levels will use this approach at some point (e.g. in after previously using packages or scheduling groups).
This particular lesson is for sites that prefer to import course requests, rather than do them individually.
Note: Import files should be formatted for individual school sites and not the district as a whole.
If you have course requests in a comma- or tab-delimited file (Excel files can be saved as tab-delimited files), you can import those requests. Your file must be created in such similar column format and adhere to the notes below.
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. Obviously, courses are required too and we match based on the School Course ID (not Short Name or Long Name). The sample includes student first name and last name, but we do not use for matching at all.
3. There is no limit to the number of course requests a student can have. The example shows 7 requests, 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. Term-specific requests (ie. Student X can only take Woodshop course in S1): Please 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 or not.
6. Alternate Courses: The import tool will allow you to import alternate course request(s), per the primary course request. An example would be that Student X needs to take Woodshop in S1. However, if that's not available, the next alternate would be Painting If this is not available, hopefully will get the 3rd alternate of SocceThese are the rules of how this works.
a. Alternates require you use brackets around the courses (ie. [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.
**Some additional things to keep in mind:
- Each column is treated as a unique request. Please do not confuse this with alternates. If you have for example, 10 columns for Student X (assuming the student has all 10 columns populated), the student will get 10 requests. In the example, Melissa will have 7 total requests (with some alternates within P6 and P7).
- Although we flag each request with a priority (ie. 1, 2...7), this does not necessarily mean that a student will get that course. Depending on course availability or other factors, a student may for example, not get a P1 request, but get the course request in P7.
1. Click the Scheduling tab.
2. Under Course Requests, click Import Course Requests.
1. Use the Choose File button to select the file you want to upload.
2. If the first row/line of your file contains a descriptive header row, check the Header Row option.
3. If you want to replace all of the course requests already in the system with the data in your file, check the Delete existing? option. Be extremely careful using this option because it will remove ALL course requests that are in place for the school and session. For example, you are importing a file that has 50 students' requests. Currently at the school and session, there are 500 students with requests already in place. Using this option will remove all 500 students' course requests and import the 50, ending with only 50 students with course requests.
4. To test the entire upload process without actually changing any data in the system, check the Dry Run option.
5. If your file is comma-delimited, change the Delimiter option to Comma. If your file is tab-delimited, select Tab. Your file must be in one of these 2 formats to upload properly. Note that Excel files may be saved as tab-delimited files and then used in this way after they have been converted (if you keep an Excel file in the Excel format it will not work).
6. For Session, select the year for which you are uploading data (i.e., the upcoming school year).
7. Click Submit.
A preview of your data will appear on screen. For each column, specify the type of data that is being uploaded using the Column Type drop-down. If the column contains a type of data that does not appear in the list, select the Ignore option. If a column contains course requests for a particular term, use the Term drop-down menu to select the term to which the column refers. For year-long course requests, or course requests that don’t need to be limited to any particular term, leave the Term option blank. Click Submit to complete the import process.
Next Steps
Proceed to the next lesson in this manual for support with the next step.