Adding Courses

The brief guide below covers some frequently asked questions and guides on setting up courses.

How to add courses individually

To add a course to the DCS, go to the courses section and click ‘add course’ in the top right hand corner. Here you will find a straightforward form where you can fill in all the information needed to set up a new course. Once you have completed the form, click ‘create’ and the course will be added to the DCS.

How to bulk upload courses

To complete a bulk upload of courses, go to ‘Course Upload’, which can be found on the navigation panel on the left hand side of the screen under the 'Administration' heading. To enter brand new courses click ‘Download blank .CSV’ and when asked to select an update type, choose ‘Course Update’. This will generate a spreadsheet where you can enter all the course details from scratch. Once you have completed the spreadsheet, upload it onto the system by clicking ‘bulk update’ on the course upload screen. 

Please note that the spreadsheet must have all the mandatory fields filled in, and must be saved as a .CSV for the file to upload successfully. Each course must have a unique reference, as module codes must be completely unique (you cannot add two duplicate course codes to the DCS). If a course code has changed for any of your courses and you need to map from old course code to new, you can do this by keeping the old course code in column A of the spreadsheet and then adding the new course code in to column B.

The bulk course upload is normally quite quick to complete, however there is no alert to show when it is complete. Please therefore only click the course upload button once, wait for a few minutes and then use summary report in the previous uploads section to check if it has been successful (see screenshot below). The date information in the first column, will help you identify your most recent upload.

If the upload is unsuccessful, you will receive an error message (as in below screenshot), which will detail why the upload failed.

FAQs

Do we have to set up courses manually (i.e. by typing in all the details)?

If you are not already set up on the DCS, CLA can arrange for a bulk upload of the necessary content and data. If you prefer (for example, you only run a few courses) you can opt to upload manually instead.

After your initial upload (whether bulk or manual), there will be further opportunities for bulk uploads, or again you can set up manually if you prefer.