Before we start
The software can be configured to automatically generate new academic plans when the catalog year is updated within the institution's SIS.
This happens as a part of a background job that runs every 15 minutes.
By default each student's academic plan is empty (there are no courses, and no assigned academic plan template), and it is in the "New" status.
The possible Academic Plan statuses are:
- New
- Pending Advisor
- Pending Student
- Approved
When a staff member makes changes (adds or removes a course or course group to/from the academic plan), the status automatically moves to "Pending Advisor". If a student makes changes, the status automatically moves to "Pending Student". Staff members will see a "Send to Student" button when the plan is in the "Pending Advisor" status, and students will see a "Send to Advisor" button when the plan is in the "Pending Student" status.
Students are unable to see their plan until the plan has been submitted to the student. The software can be configured such that the academic plan is submitted to the student when the system creates the academic plan. This is done using the "job.submitPreviouslyCreatedPlansToStudent.enabled" setting in Administration Global Configuration Application. To submit plans to students on creation (rather than having the Advisor perform the action):
- As an administrator, navigate to the Admin application area.
- Select Institution, then click the Edit button.
- Scroll down to the option “Plan Sent to Student on Creation.” Click the checkbox to enable this feature.
- Scroll to the bottom of the Edit window and click Save.
The SS&E System will keep an Academic Plan up to date with your SIS, including marking courses as "Passed" or "Failed." SS&E will also automatically remove courses given the status "Dropped" if it was initially loaded from your SIS by the SS&E and not added to the plan by an advisor or student.
Read-only academic plans cannot be modified in SS&E; these plans are governed by the SIS and must be altered there. See Read-only Academic Plans to learn more about read-only academic plans.
Notifications
When an Academic Plan is submitted by a staff member, an email notification is sent to the student.
- If the Academic Plan has never been in the "Pending Student" status before, then the "Academic Plan Submit To Student Welcome Message Template" is sent.
- Otherwise, the "Academic Plan Submit To Student Message Template" is sent.
Note: If the software is configured to automatically place Academic Plans in the "Pending Student" status when they're created, then the Academic Plan Submit To Student Welcome Message Template effectively never gets used because the Academic Plan started out in the "Pending Student" status.
When an Academic Plan is submitted by a student, an email notification is sent to the student's advisor and coach (if assigned) using the "Academic Plan Submit To Advisor Message Template".
When an Academic Plan is approved by a staff member, an email notification is sent to the student using the "Academic Plan Approved To Student Message Template" template.
The message templates used for these notifications are configured in Institution Administration, on the Admin page.
Viewing the Academic Plan
In order to view a student's Academic Plan, click on the graduation cap icon on the student's profile.
This can be accessed from a student record within SS&E by clicking on the People dropdown, then selecting Student (if Person Types are enabled) or by selecting Students from the main navigation bar, then clicking the name of a student in the list of students, then clicking the Academic Plan from the top right corner of the student record.
This will open up the student's academic plan in a new browser tab.
To assign a new Academic Plan Template to a student, select the Template from the available choices in the Template field, then click the "Assign Template" button.
Once this occurs, SS&E will no longer change the template automatically if a student changes their academic program of study. Effectively, the student/template relationship has been locked in place by the advisor regardless of what data SS&E receives from the SIS.
Modifying a Student's Academic Plan
From the Academic Plan, a staff member may easily add and remove courses on future terms of the student's Academic Plan. To assist in planning, the courses on the assigned Academic Plan Template are listed on the right-side of the page, and allow dragging and dropping of courses into terms. Changes made on this page are saved immediately. Simply drag and drop courses from the right side of the page onto the placeholders for future terms.
Tip: Course Groups on Academic Plan Templates default to collapsed to save screen space, but can be expanded to display the courses within those course groups.
When a course is already a part of the student's Academic Plan, the course will be displayed in a "disabled" style on the list of courses in the Academic Plan Template to make it easy to see what courses are planned and what courses are not yet planned on the student's Academic Plan.
To see the details of a course on the Academic Plan, simply click the name of the course.
Academic plans can only be edited for the student's current and future terms. For more details about editing an academic plan click here.
Course Groups
Course Groups can be dragged and dropped onto a student's plan.
This does not plan any specific courses on the student's academic plan, but indicates a 'suggestion' to add courses from that group in order to meet that group's requirements. For instance, some course groups can say "Choose 1", and that suggests that the student should pick one of the courses in that group to take that term.
Note that the credit hours listed next to the course group is the minimum number of credit hours the student must take to satisfy the course group requirements (as configured in the academic plan template). This does not count toward the summary information that lists the total course and credit hours for the term.
When a course group is planned, a star appears next to it in the side bar on the right side of the screen.
Course Status
In the Academic Plan, a Status is displayed for each entry that has been added to the plan.
The possible statuses are "Planned", "In Progress", and "Complete." The statuses appear in these scenarios:
- "Planned" - The student has not registered for the course.
- "In Progress" - The student has registered for the course, but the Term end date has not passed.
- "Complete" - The student has registered for the course and the Term end date has passed.
Note: Institution Administration includes a setting "Registration End Date Used For Determining Plan Term Active" that will change how the above In-Progress/Completed statuses display on all Academic Plan courses.
- The default setting is False, therefore the above statuses will display.
- When set to True, the system will use the term record Registration End Date imported on the Academic Calendar data feed, instead of the Term end date to determine if an Academic Plan course status is In-Progress or Completed.
Synchronization
In order to determine the status of a planned course, the system will scan the student's transcript for instances of that course. This is done by a background job once an hour. The job examines each planned course and determines if there is a matching course on the student's transcript based on the course's code and number of credits. If a matching course is found, it stores a link between the transcript course and the planned course. This is what is used to determine the status of the planned course.
Note: This process does not take course equivalency into account.
If the student has not registered for a course that is on the plan, but the term has ended, the course will be removed from the plan automatically.
Course Group Matching
When a course is on the student's academic plan, and that course appears in the academic plan template (in the pane on the right hand side of the page), the course will be demarcated with an icon on the template portion of the screen.
A potentially complex scenario arises when a course is associated with multiple course groups on the academic plan template. The system is designed to allocate a course toward one of the course groups. This is because course groups can have completion requirements (based on credit hours and/or number of courses), and the completion of one course should not count toward multiple course groups - this would effectively duplicate the course and cause inaccuracies as to whether or not the template's requirements are being met.
Therefore, the system will attempt to find the "best match" for the course among the course groups within the template, and other instances of that course in the template will be demarcated to indicate that the course was allocated to a different area of the template. This matching process happens on-the-fly, so if something changes on the plan or on the student's transcript, that could change the allocation of that course on the academic plan template.
The "best match" algorithm's primary goal is to allocate courses in such a way as to complete the most course group requirements as defined on the template. In general, if a course is the last and only course required to complete a course group's requirements (give the current state of the plan), the system will allocate the course to that course group. If there are multiple course groups where this is true, it is allocated to the first-course group in the list that can be completed by the course. If no course groups would be completed by the allocation of the course to any of the course groups, then the first-course group in the list is chosen by the system for the allocation of that course.