Program Enrollment describes an educational model where students must complete a strictly defined set of courses towards their academic objective in a specified sequence. Requirements must also be completed at certain points in the program and are often structured in a series of levels or stages, where one stage must be successfully completed before a student can progress and enroll in the next set of courses, examinations, or other academic activities. In core Campus Solutions, enrollment is largely a course driven process in which students select courses (with some controls and restrictions) that apply toward degree requirements. The Program Enrollment feature provides a flexible structure that can enable institutions to build frameworks that use various program requirements to organize curriculum and provide the structure to order and control enrollment.
At the center of the setup for Program Enrollment are two important components:
- Academic Item Types: Academic programs that follow the Program Enrollment model have various items like courses, milestones, study periods, and groups of courses, for example, that organize what students are required to enroll in and when they are required to enroll. Academic Item Types allow you to define the attributes and to establish the role and level of each of these types of items and build them into a program structure hierarchy.
- Academic Item Registry (AIR): The foundation of program enrollment setup is the Academic Item Registry (AIR). Use AIR to define the framework, content, and rules for a program of study – essentially a set of academic requirements that define what courses a student needs to take and the sequence in which they need to be taken and satisfactorily completed.
The features described in this documentation, principally Academic Item Types and the Academic Item Registry, allow you to create program offerings using hierarchical frameworks that support institutional policies and practice for recording and calculating results, tracking student progress through a program of study, and ultimately assessing whether a student is eligible for the relevant degree or award upon completion. These hierarchies are organized using parent child relationships, in which the various levels can contribute to the next level. These hierarchies can be generated and viewed as a tree that represents the various levels of a program of study.