Updating Courses

The DCS allows you to amend courses once they are set up. For example, you may not know when you set up a course exactly how many students will be taking it - in this case, you will be able to add the number of students once this information is confirmed.

This guide will take you through the following:

• How to bulk update courses
• How to update courses individually
• Description of report headers
• FAQs

Updating courses in bulk

In the course upload section you will find a list of previous updates you or other users at your institution have completed. If you wish to view exactly what was updated during each update, click ‘view summary report’ to generate a spreadsheet that will show each course that was updated and the details that were added. To update existing courses, select ‘Generate .CSV pre-filled with current info’.

If you only wish to update the student numbers, when asked to select an update type choose ‘Student Numbers Only’. This will generate a report that only contains the course code and student numbers.

If you wish to update all course information, you can select ‘Generate .CSV pre-filled with current info’ and when asked to select an update type choose ‘Course Update’.

As your upload occurs, a progression bar will let you know how far along you are. Click OK, or close the pop-up when complete.

Once you have updated the spreadsheet, select ‘Bulk update’ on the course upload screen and upload the updated information. 

How to update the course upload spreadsheet

For each column in the template you will need a set result.

• CourseCode is required. This must be completely unique (2 courses for an HEI in the DCS cannot share the same course code) and cannot simply be amended / changed. If you need to change the course code you will need to put the new course code in column B and leave the original course code in column A.
• NewCourseCode. This must be completely unique. This will change the previous course code.
• CourseName is required.
• NumberOfWeeks. Must be a number between 1-52. 
• NumberOfStudents. Must be a whole positive number. We would recommend an entry of 0 for courses where the student number has not yet been determined (as you will get a warning about these courses before rollover).
• Department. Is not required and can be for your own internal reference.
• Subject. Is not required and can be for your own internal reference.
• LeadLecturer. This should be for the lead lecturer only (you can manually add additional lecturers under the courses section) and should be limited to one person. This is not a required field.
• LeadLecturerEmail. This has to be a unique reference in email format (you can add the same lecturer for multiple courses however). This is not a required field, unless the lecturer name is added.
• Description. This is not mandatory but allows you to add a description of the course. 
• Status. This field is not mandatory, and the default status is Active. New courses with a blank status will be set to active. This field can be used to bulk archive, reinstate or delete courses. Read more about the statuses in the FAQ section here. 

After you upload your courses you should check the latest Summary Report to see the changes. Any failure will result in a Failure Report being created, which you can check to see what was wrong in the template. 

How to update courses individually

Go to ‘Courses’ which can be found on the left hand side of the page in the navigation panel. Find the course you wish to update by using the search box on the right hand side at the top of the page. Clicking ‘update’ will take you to a form in which you can edit the course details. Once you have updated the fields you need to complete, select ‘Save’ and the course will be updated.

You will also be able to delete a course should this be necessary, by selecting ‘delete’ which can be found underneath ‘update’.

You can also archive a course that is not being run, may may be used in the future, by selecting ‘archive’ which can be found underneath ‘Delete’.

Another update may be necessary if an academic changes their mind about which chapter is required – in this case, you would be able to change the content within a course by adding new links to extracts, and/or deleting or archiving links to extracts from a course.

FAQs

Is it possible to bulk archive or delete courses, or do I need to do this course by course? 

It is now possible to change the status of a course in bulk on the course upload page. The Statuses are:

• Active a course in an Active status is live and all the published links are accessible

• Archived a course in an Archived status is not live and the published links are not accessible

• Deleted a course in a Deleted status is dead and the course and content within cannot be accessed or recovered

To change the status of a course, in the CSV when updating courses, set the status to Active to reinstate an archived course, to Archived to archive an active course, and to Deleted to delete an active or archived course. It is not possible to reinstate a course which has been deleted. 

If we delete a course, are all links associated with it automatically deleted too?

Yes, all links will be deleted. If the link remains on a reading list and a student tries to click the link they will receive an error message. However, all scans remain in the DCS in perpetuity, unless the relevant item becomes excluded. This is also true of archived courses, though the links will be accessible again when you click reactivate and reactivate the links within.

What level of detail will exist to link to our course information? We have up to three or four levels within a course specification on our VLE.

The same level of detail as in CLA’s Digital Copy Record Form - so you will need to apply a unique course code for each course, which will then form part of the link generated for each reading.

As course codes have to be pre-entered, could this not create problems for ordering? Often we don’t get details (or confirmation) of course codes until after the item is ordered.

Unfortunately you cannot set up courses without a course code. You could use a unique reference if you do not know the course code and then update with the real code later.

Where course codes change from year to year, will it be possible to edit these – or will we need to re-assign content and/or do anything else?

When doing a bulk update, you can update the course codes. Once this is completed, the DCS automatically updates all links so you do not need to create them again - however please note that the link will not change and will remain the same.

What if there is more than one lecturer for a course?

Please manually add these additional lecturers under the course section.