E10 - Methods for setting up Split Elective Lines

Modified on Thu, 14 Aug at 12:41 AM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preamble
General Process
Detail
- Scenario
- Process
Variations

Preamble

Schools sometimes do not have the resources to have an entire year level participating in elective classes all at the same time. Therefore, the year level cohort must be split into two halves. Half of the year level will attend an elective block of classes while the remainder of the year level attend core classes.

Achieving this requires using the Choice and Lines module to generate the best arrangement of classes (on Lines) and provide the class lists; but because each block of electives includes only half the student cohort, there will be structural issues once the classes are created in Class data. These can be easily fixed in Class data in order to obtain the correct year structure prior to timetabling.

General Process

Use Edval Choice (or another method) to collect student subject preferences.
Generate Lines and class lists.
Create classes.
Modify Class data to ‘correct’ the structures.

Detail

Scenario

The school wishes Year7 students to do two semester-based electives (one each semester), but wants to split the elective blocks into halves, based on the Letter groups (Groups A - H). This means that Groups A-D will do their electives together in a block, and Groups E-H do their electives together at a different time of the week.

In this scenario, Form (or Letter) groups will be determined after the elective blocks are decided, so it does not matter which elective block the students are placed in. Adjustments can be made if there are particular circumstances for a student e.g. membership of a specific program that only exists in one half of the year level.

The scenario where students are already placed in Form groups is explained as a Variation at the end of this document.

Process

1. Define the Courses and Parameters

Each student does two semester-based subjects in one block (on one line), but because we want split the year level across two blocks, set the #Elective Lines to 2.
Add a dummy/placeholder class. We will use this to force the split of students into the two halves.
Set the class size (MaxS) for the dummy class to half the number of students in the year level.

Add a Rule (eg ‘D’) to ensure students are placed into a dummy/placeholder class.
Add other Rules as necessary to achieve your desired curriculum requirements.
Add any line arrangement requirements eg HLinks, VLinks etc.

2. Student Preferences

Use Edval Choice or import from an Excel file the students' elective preferences.
Depending on how this has been done, you may need to manually add the dummy course into the Main preferences for each student (Copy and Paste).
The required result is that the main preferences show a dummy class along with the two electives (one per semester) that the student has selected to study. To the right of the bold line are the Reserve preferences.

3. Line Generation

When the lines are generated, you are looking for a structure similar to the below screenshot.

The two dummy/placeholder classes are on alternate lines, and should contain roughly the same number of students in each class.
The elective classes are spread across the two lines, containing the students not in the dummy class on each line.

The arrows indicate the two groups of students:
- a student in 7DUM1:2 on Line 1 will be in elective classes on Line 2

- a student in 7DUM1:1 on Line 2 will be in elective classes on Line 1

4. Create Classes

Once happy with the arrangement of classes and students), classes can be created.

This will result in the Yr7 electives (including the dummy classes) appearing in Class data on Line 1 and Line 2.

Because half the students will be doing electives and the other half doing other ‘core’ classes, a Line structure cannot be used for these elective blocks. It will be necessary to change the entry in the Line column for these classes to a 'Group' based entry.

Take a copy of the dummy class lists and provide them to your student managers (these lists define which half of the Year level a student is in and will need to be used when assigning students to Form groups).
Delete the dummy classes.
Link the elective classes, in each block, to each other so that they will always be scheduled together.
Change the entries in the Line column to reflect the Groups that will be doing those classes.
In this example, one elective block will be Groups 7A/B/C/D and the other 7E/F/G/H.
Be sure to add group entries to the classes in both semesters.
If there are more classes than groups, it will not matter, so long as they are vertically linked as per below. Leave the extra classes with a blank Line entry (if the Link column is filled in this will not be an issue).
When prompted, select ‘Manage class-lists manually’ rather than ‘Link to group’.

Variations

Variation 1: Students have already been assigned Letter groups and therefore need to select electives from the correct electives block

In this scenario, the main impact is on the collection set up of student preferences.

Ensuring the student selects subjects in the correct block can be achieved in several ways.

Option A:

Configure two Datasets, using the Groups column in the datasets set up to specify which Letter Groups will be in each dataset.
Ensure that the Letter column has been filled out in the Student data screen so that they see the correct Choice form.

Option B:

Create different dummy/placeholder classes and ask the student to select the correct one.

Note that students will only see the Subject name when selecting courses in Edval Choice, not the Course Code, so it is possible to collect answers to questions as well as subject choices.

The two placeholder classes then function in the same way during line generation as in the original example.

Variation 2: There is more than one elective line for each half of the year

In this scenario, students study four semester-based subjects across two blocks. The main concern here is ensuring the class lists for each half of the year level are the same in both/all elective lines.

As with the main scenario above, the #Elective Lines is double the number of subjects each student does per semester.
A dummy/placeholder class is needed for each Line to manage the half-year blocks. We will link the class lists so that the same students are in each half for every line.
The Rules are the same as for the main scenario, just the number of required units has been updated to reflect two electives per semester instead of one.

In the View menu, select 'Enable tertiary features'.
Add 'Same as' Constraints to force the same class lists for pairs of the placeholder classes.
In this example, 7DUM1:1 will be the same as 7DUM2:1 and 7DUM1:2 the same as 7DUM2:2.
The student preferences must include both dummy/placeholder classes.

The Lines solution should appear similar to this. Students in one half of the year level will do Electives on Line 1 and Line 3, and the other half on Line 2 and Line 4.

Once classes are created, the process for correcting the structures is the same as the main example.