Overview

A course outline is a guide for all students and instructors to engage in for the whole duration of the course enrolment. Paradigm provides an avenue where you can outline the unit components and complexities involved in creating a Course Outline, including: setting up core and elective units for a course, adding prerequisite, co-requisite, and disallowed units to a Course Outline, and adding substitute rules to a Course Outline. A Course Outline can contain all possible units that are permitted for inclusion in the course. Once a Course Outline has been created, Unit Enrolments can be created by the students or the administration staff.

Key Terms and Concepts

Course Outline User Interface

The Course Outline screen is intended to be completed by Administration Staff with elevated permission level access. All possible units that contribute to the course, are included in the Course Outline definition, including core, elective, prerequisite, co-requisite, and disallowed units, substitute rules and constraints. The details included in the Course Outline are used as the basis for defining the Course Plan for a student. The Course Plan can be defined for or by a student, or by administration staff, for a specific student’s course enrolment.

It is imperative that all core units and all elective units that can contribute toward completion of a course, are listed and saved in the course outline, before beginning to create any student’s course plan based upon that course outline. The core and elective units must have been saved in Paradigm before any prerequisites or corequisites or any other constraints can be defined for a course outline, because these constraints have a direct relationship with the existing core and elective units. A constraint cannot exist without referring to an existing core or elective unit.

Course Plan Grid

The Course Plan is a grid that is restricted to a maximum of 9 columns across the screen, denoted by the columns A through I (the first through to the ninth English letters), usually representing the passage of time by semester or trimester.

The grid is restricted to a maximum of 25 rows down the screen representing the type of unit to be studied. The rows are grouped based on a shared description, so for the units to appear nicely aligned and ordered along a row and in columns across the screen, then the description needs to be exactly the same for the units to be shown on that row.

These column and row length restrictions are in place to prevent the containing grid structure from becoming unwieldy on devices with smaller display screens. Examples are shown below.

Course Plan Rules

Example Course Plans

_{Introduction to the Course Outline | 1. What is a Course Outline | 2. Adding Core and Elective Units | 3. Arranging Content on the Course Plan | 4. Adding Constraints}