Creating Courses and Sections - Genius CE & Enterprise

Creating Courses and Sections

Course and Sections have a “parent-child” relationship, and because of this, you can define certain properties of a Course and the Sections you create of that course will inherit those properties.

For example, you can define the following properties at the Course level, and the Sections you create of that course will be ‘bound’ by these properties set up at the Course level:

• Whether learners are eligible for self-registration in a course;
• Whether the course will require managerial approval;
• Whether the course has any pre-requisites, i.e. courses that must be completed before being allowed to register in this particular course.

PLEASE NOTE: A section is an instance or version of a course that is being offered at a particular time, or being taught by a particular teacher. Learners enroll and complete Sections, not Courses.

For example, you could have a course called “Bloodborne Pathogens”, and that course could have three sections: one offered in January, one in March and one in May:

When it comes to Reporting, you can obtain data across all sections of a course by obtaining progress, performance and engagement information at the course level. On the other hand, if you want to know how a specific cohort of learners is doing in their coursework, you can obtain reports at the section level that will provide you with this information.

Adding Courses

Here is a step-by-step guide to creating Courses in Genius CE & Enterprise.

Before you begin…

Before you add a course, we highly recommend that you create a Master Course Template that contains the learning content you want to deliver in the LMS you use for content delivery. This way, when you create a section of that course, Genius CE & Enterprise will copy the material in the Course Template and your learners will work off of copy of the original course material. 

In the end, you will have a ‘vertical’ structure comprised of Master Course Templates, Courses and Sections that live both at the LMS level and in Genius CE & Enterprise.

 

The Add Course Tool

Once you have your Master Course Template (or whenever you are ready to create your course), navigate to the Courses tab. You can create a Course by clicking on the Add Course menu item on the Sidebar on the left-hand side of your screen:

Complete the required fields shown in and add a name for the course. 

PLEASE NOTE: Properties set at the Course level will be inherited by the Sections created from that Course:

You can then link the Course to the Master Course Template you created at the LMS level, by entering the LMS Course ID of the Master Course Template in the field “LMS ID” in the Course.

• Every time a Section of this Course is created, Genius CE & Enterprise will search for the course material under that course ID in the LMS’s course database and create a new copy of that course that your learners will actually engage with and complete.

Associating a Preview Image to the Course

The Catalog presents all Sections made available for self-registration through an attractive tile-based interface. Genius+ stores images in Azure Blob Storage. Each course in the Catalog is represented with a small image, which you can define or edit by using the steps below:

1. Go to Administration> System Setup > File Upload and upload the image file you want to use. The file will be stored as a URL.
2. (Ex): https://stenterprisefilesprod.blob.core.windows.net/yourorginazation/upload/yourimage.png.
3. Go to the courses tab and use the URL the image upload generated as the link to the file. 

Adding Sections

Once you have created a Course in Genius CE & Enterprise you can create Sections of that Course to serve as course offerings. Whenever you create a new Section, Genius CE & Enterprise will create a copy of the Master Course Template you created for that Course in your LMS. 

To create a new section, click on the Sections tab and then click on the “Add Section” menu item on the sidebar to the left-hand side of your screen.

One can determine the following properties at the section level: 

• Enrollment cap – the maximum number of learners that can enroll in this section. If more learners than those defined in the Cap enroll in the course attempt to register, they will be placed on a Waitlist.
• Credits (CEUs) – the credit-hours that will be granted to Learners when they complete the section. This information will be displayed on the Certificates and Transcripts issued by Enterprise+ to your Learners when they complete their coursework.
• Instructor(s) – the name of the instructor that will be responsible for this section. You can pick an Instructor from a drop-down menu, making it possible for you to quickly associate a section to an existing instructor in your learning initiative. Assigning a Section to an Instructor will grant them access to the progress, performance and engagement information of the learners who enroll in that section.
• Term – the Term that this section will be associated with.
• Affiliation – You can use this field to control access to the learning opportunity. If you specify an Affiliation, only learners from that Affiliation will be able to see this section in their Course Catalog, and then enroll in that section. If you do not want to restrict access to this specific learning opportunity, set this field to have a value of “Any”.
• Start date – the date in which the section will start.
• End date- the date in which the section will end.
• Duration – the number of calendar days that the section will last.
• Price – If you want to define a price for this section, you can do so here. The Course Catalog entry for this Section will show the Price you type in this section.
• Location – you can define where the section will meet by completing this field. The Location will be displayed in the Course Catalog.
• Meeting times - which define when the section will meet. If you define Meeting times for a section, you will be able to take attendance for that section.
• Certificate - A certificate set at the section level would disseminate that particular certificate for each completion of this section.
• External Link - This link would take the learner enrolled to wherever the section is hosted if NOT in an LMS. For example, if the course is a webinar, you might add a Zoom link here for folks to join. When they click "Go to Course" when enrolled, they will be redirected to this external link.
• Competencies - Learning targets and skills that the learner would achieve or master when completing this section.
• Completion Formula - Overrides the globally set formula in parameters that measures whether or not an enrollment is considered complete. 
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You can also determine the delivery approach at the Section Level: online, face-to-face, or hybrid.

You can check that your section has been created by clicking back on the Sections tab, which will show a listing of all Active Sections you have created in your instance of Genius CE & Enterprise.

 

Ongoing Courses or Rolling Admission Courses

When creating sections, you can use the Start Date and Duration fields to define whether the section will be ongoing or whether it will have a well-defined start and end date. 

• Rolling Admission, Limited-Time Sections: If you leave the Start Date field blank, but add a figure under Duration, learners will be able to enroll in this section, but they will be forced to complete the course within a number of days defined in the Duration entry.
• Fixed Start-Date, Ongoing Sections: If you add a date under the Start Date field and leave the Duration field blank, learners will only be able to access the section if today’s date is greater than the Start Date, but they will not have a deadline to finish the course.
• Fixed Start-Date, Limited-Time Sections: If you add both a Start Date and a Duration, learners will be able to access the section if today’s date is greater than the Start Date AND lesser than the End Date. This means that Learners will have a well-defined start and end date for the section.

Your choice of Start Date and Duration will also impact the order in which these sections are displayed in the Course Catalog.

• Sections with a start and end date are sorted in the Course Catalog by the Section’s Start Date in ascending order, then the Section’s End Date, then alphabetical by the section’s Name. 

Status: Active or Archived

In Enterprise+, a course or a section has two status options: ACTIVE and ARCHIVED. 

• Active - when a course or section is set up as Active, users are able to enroll in it and will see it in the Learner’s Course Catalog.
• Archived – when a course or section is Archived, the class is no longer available for enrollment, and learners do not see it in their Course Catalog. When a course or section is Archived, this means the class is unavailable in a typical LMS.

PLEASE NOTE: Archiving a course or section in Genius CE & Enterprise does not mean the same thing as when you archive a course in an LMS. In an LMS, an archived course is a full backup of that course at that snapshot in time, which can be used to restore the full contents of that course.  Genius CE & Enterprise only stores the final grade and completion status and cannot restore the full contents of a LMS course if it has been archived.*