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Scheduling

This section describes how to maintain time-dependent information in the system including

  • Academic years
  • Trimesters
  • Cohorts

Trimesters are defined at the same time as an academic year. This makes it more difficult to make errors.

There are a couple of principles to bear in mind when managing time-dependent data:

Some modules span academic year boundaries

This means that when you are working on one academic year, the system also needs details about the previous academic year and the following one.

When you are setting up the system for the first time, it is important to create a definition of the previous academic year, and to include any cohorts who started n that year, but who will finish in the current one.

Likewise, in order to schedule cohorts correctly, the acadermic year following the current one must exist in the system. So for example, if you are working on 2020, you must also define 2019 and 2021.

Some students are part-time

A student can be recognised as part-time because they belong to a part-time programme. However, that does not necessarily mean that they will follow a module on a different schedule from other students. The main module where this is an issue is the Masters dissertation. If a student will finish the module and hand in at a different time from the other students in the cohort, their end trimester and submission date must be set individually.

Cohorts

The main rule is that there is one cohort for each delivery of a module. A cohort is technically the group of students following the specific module delivery. They are expected to start at the same time and finish at the same time. Sometimes, a full-time delivery of a module starts in the same trimester as a part-time delivery. In that case, there should be two separate cohort created in Mentor.

The system makes it easy to download a cohort of students from SITS and then to import the data into Mentor.

Page help

The links below duplicate the help information provided within the application.

Academic years and trimesters

Cohorts