Create Courses, Terms, and Course Offerings

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Explain what courses, terms, and course offerings are in EDA.
• Create an academic term that you can apply to all courses.
• Create a course offering for a new course.

Courses, Terms, and Course Offerings

In this unit we continue EDA setup by creating courses, terms and course offerings.

A course is simply a class offered at a school or institution. For example, Cloudy College offers an Anatomy course. A course is typically a child of an account with the Academic Department record type because you can share a course across multiple programs but it’s aligned with only one academic department. To see the Anatomy course in Cloudy’s EDA org, users look at the Science Department account.

A term is a period of time when a course is offered. When you create a term, such as Fall 2020, and associate it with the course, you can create a course offering.

The course offering represents the actual running of the course. It has a room, instructor, dates, section number, and so on. A course represents the class that the institution provides to students, whereas course offerings are actual iterations of that course with a set faculty member, time, and day.

Whew, that’s a lot of terminology! Here’s a simple diagram to show you how they all relate to each other and a chart to help you remember the terms.

Create a Course

As mentioned earlier, Cloudy College offers an Anatomy course. To offer that course for students to enroll in, admin Nina Brown also had to create terms and course offerings. Because courses fall under departments in EDA, she started with the department that offers the Anatomy course.

If you don’t already have an account with the Academic Department record type, you need to create it first.

1. In EDA, click the Accounts tab.
2. Click the name of the department that this course is associated with. For this example, select Science Department.
3. Navigate to the Courses related list and click New.
   
   
   
4. Enter the course name. For this example, the course name is Anatomy.
5. Enter an optional course ID. The ID is just a text value and is likely used in a course catalog. For this example, the course ID for Anatomy is SCI-211.
   
   Your screen looks something like this:
   
   
   
6. Click Save.

Create a Term

You created the course—which means you're well on your way to creating a course offering. But first, you need to create a term that you can assign to course offerings. The term defines the dates for a course offering. A term is associated with an account (often an account for the entire institution or a school within the institution).

Schools can use terms in different ways. For example, different colleges within a university, such as the Business School and Law School, might be on different schedules, so the university would set up multiple terms. Terms in EDA are flexible, and you can set up as many as you need.

At Cloudy, there is a college-wide Fall term, so Nina creates the term from the account representing Cloudy College. Typically, this account has the Educational Institution record type. If the account doesn’t exist, you need to create it.

1. In EDA, click the Terms tab.
2. Click New.
3. Name the term. For this example, the term is named Fall 2020.
4. Select (or create) the account. For this example, we select Cloudy College, which is an educational institution. You can select Cloudy College if you've already created an account while practicing in other EDA modules or you can create it here.
5. Enter the start and end dates for the term. For this example, we enter August 24, 2020 as the start date and December 18, 2020 for the term’s end date.
6. Click Save.

Create the Course Offering

Course created? Check. Term created? Check. Now you need the course offering for contacts to enroll in. Remember, a course offering just means that the course is being offered at a specific time, or term. Let’s say the Anatomy course at Cloudy College is available during the Fall 2020 term. Katrina Watson is a professor in the Science Department. She will be teaching Anatomy in Fall 2020.

Follow these steps to create a course offering.

1. In EDA, click the Course Offerings tab.
2. Click New.
3. In the Course field, select the Course or click +New Course to create one. In this example, we select the course we just created, Anatomy.
4. In the Term field, select a term, or click + New Term to create one. Select the term you just created, Fall 2020.
5. Enter the course offering ID and other details. Let’s name this course offering SCI 211-FALL 2020. It can really be anything you want. Every institution has its own naming conventions.
6. In the Primary Faculty field, select a faculty member. For this example, we select Cloudy faculty member Katrina Watson. You can create a contact record for Katrina here or use another contact if you have other sample contact records in your EDA org.
   
   Your screen will look something like this.
   
   
   
7. Click Save.

Adding a faculty member automatically creates a course connection for that contact. It also marks the contact as Primary on the course connection. You can learn more about course connections in the Constituent Management in EDA module. It's linked in the Resources section below.

Things are really coming together now. With courses, terms, and course offerings created, the EDA setup for Cloudy College is really starting to take shape. Let’s keep it up and invite facilities and time blocks to this EDA party. See you in the next unit!

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Model Courses and Curricula
• Trailhead: Constituent Management in EDA