Charles Kerns Comments

Here are the questions I had after looking at the CourseManagement API.

Questions:
Courses can have different number of units for different students (e.g., 4 units for grad students, 3 for undergrad is common; or can vary from 1-4 for some classes depending on arrangement with instructor). Currently we do not display number of credits information for each student in CW so it could be left blank. But this would be useful to show (to help faculty keep everything straight). Since credit is a string and I assume can be loaded on a feed from the registrar for students or the course, I assume that all is well. Is it?

We wanted groups to be used for sets of agents that are in different courses( like a group having permissions for editing (or making use of) an assessment template or question pool) Are groups tied to Courses ? Or are there course groups and other kinds of groups?

When you get aggregated enrollment for a course (e.g. for grading an exam) yu want everyone from a cross-listed course as well. Does the aggregator get everyone from the cross listed course?

Can you get an aggregated list of instructors and others (some may only be for one of the cross listed course?)

When you aggregate enrollment for a course does it check for student dupes. (a person may be in a discussion section and a lab--both would be "sections" in this model, I believe)

When you aggregate enrollment for a course would you get "other" agents like auditors, or guests (instructors do informal enrollments at Stanford and let students sit in courses that they have not officially enrolled in)?

I am ignoring typos like setTile instead of setTitle.
ck

one more thing--someone asked if there were limits on number of students on Mar 3 and you replied no you can have as many as you want. I was thinking of limits in a different way: i.e., caps on the number of people who can sign up. This is because at Stanford the registrar does not keep section information (because the registrar records grades and credit on a course basis, not by section, and the responsible instructor is for the course --only grad students run sections). One of the most important features of Coursework was its section signup capability.

So we have caps for sections and courses (limits on number of students) that are used during student signup. In coursework the course caps are used by the signup tool to limit number of students who can signup any one course. They are soft caps, instructors can override them. This will be something that must be added to the Stanford implementation at some point. I dont know how many other schools have caps only in their registrar's system, or also need them in the cms.

But would it make sense to have a max number of students as data for the section (or course) as a data field in the API. Or should that be handled somewhere else?

ck