Getting to grips with Course Management – 3: Creating courses

Once you’ve done all the setup, creating courses is the easy bit. Courses, if you didn’t already know, are legal entity specific. So you have to make sure that you’re working in the correct legal entity when you start creating them (if you don’t have more than one legal entity, you don’t need to worry).

When you hit ‘New’ on the courses page a new course is presented. The course ID is assigned based on a number sequence (Huma_51 is the default, just in case you needed to change it). Certain details then pull through onto the course when you select the course type.

The course status will default to ‘created’ – we’ll come back to course statuses in a bit. The slightly misleadingly named ‘scheduling’ field allows you to select questionnaires that you want participants to complete. We’ll come back to that later as well. The ‘Setup’ field allows you to chose the format of the event itself. You get 3 options:

1. Standard – which basically means you’re creating the event, but not telling the system how the day will be structured
2. Agenda – means you’ll set up a series of agenda items to describe the day
3. Agenda + session – means you can break down each agenda item further to accommodate specialist subject areas (tracks) who may attend different sessions for the agenda item. This makes more sense in practice, so we’ll come back to it.

The other fields pretty much speak for themselves, with the exception of workflow.

Useful feature – when you select a course location and corresponding classroom, the maximum no. of participants auto-populates based on the capacity of the classroom selected.

You can add instructors to the course here, and specify which of the event’s sessions they’ll be running.

When you’ve filled in all the boxes you need to fill in, you can set the course status to ‘open’. This makes the course available for participants to register through self service (if you’ve set that option to on), and also means that you can manually register participants directly.

Now you just have to manage participants…