Entering Course Requests in the Student Portal

Overview

Course Requests can optionally be entered in the student portal if your school allows students to enter their own Course Requests for the upcoming year.

Course Configuration

Before allowing faculty or students to add course requests in their portals, be sure to review the following course request settings on each course:

• Available for request: This must be checked if teachers or students should be able to see and request the course from their portal page.
• Related Courses: Prerequisite and subsequent classes can be linked to a course to help end users know the order in which the classes they are requesting should be taken in.
• Course Classifications: You may also wish to review any Course Classifications that are set on courses to help end users filter the list of courses. This would include any AP or Honors level flags set on the course.

You can review more about how to configure these items on courses in the Course Catalog documentation.

Enabling Student Portal Course Requests

Course requests can be entered via the Course Request tab in the Student portal. The Student Portal Course Request tab can be enabled or disabled by a System Administrator in Axiom by editing System Parameters.

To enable course requests in the Student Portal, edit the “Student Portal Course Request Status” parameter found in the System Parameters query on the System homepage. Course requests can be turned on with one of the following options:

1. Enabled for all students
2. Enabled for re-enrolled students only
3. Enabled, but read only

After this, grab the appropriate Portal Shortcut Link and add it into the student portal.

Student Portal Entry

The Student Portal allows students to enter their own course requests through the Course Requests tab in the portal. Students can also view prior year courses, as well as their current year schedule. There is currently no functionality in place to prevent students from requesting courses they are not eligible for; however, requests that are entered in the portal are not automatically approved.

Course Requests

Students can search for courses to request by using the search bar found in the bottom half of the screen. The bar will search as they type to filter results. Students can also filter available courses by Subject or Classification using the drop down menus next to the search bar. To apply filtering, they can click on the subject or classification tag they would like to filter by. Clicking on the tag again will remove the filter. By default, the list of available courses is already restricted to the school level the student is applying for (e.g. students applying for 8th grade will only see Middle School level courses). If a course has a catalog description, the text will appear under the course name in the search area.

Once a course request has been added, the following can be specified:

• Group: A Course Request Group is a way to associate course requests together. A request group is simply represented by a number. This field only applies to schools using the Veracross scheduler.
• Enrollment Level: This field can be disabled if not used. The enrollment level field allows schools to indicate that a student is taking the same class as other students (same time, teacher, curriculum, etc), but the work required is somehow different (i.e. more/less reading, more/less tests, more/less class work, etc).
• Notes: Used to enter any special notes or messages regarding a course request. For example, if an Advisor wants to request a course for a student knowing they have not taken the prerequisite, the advisor might add a note mentioning that a teacher recommended the student take this course.
• Priority: Requests can be given a First, Second, or Third priority. The priority of a request is taken into account by the Veracross Scheduler when enrolling students in classes. Requests that are given First priority are scheduled above requests given a Second or Third priority.
• Term: Used to specify the grading period in which the student wants to take this course.
• Recommended: This flag is read only in the student portal and can not be removed. This flag is used to indicate if the student is recommended for the course. For example, the teacher can indicate a student is recommended for an AP course if some sort of teacher recommendation is needed.
• Approved:  This field is read only in the student portal. When the Approved flag is checked, students cannot edit or remove the course request if the course request tab is also enabled in the student portal.
• Delete: Used to remove a course request that has been added.

Previous Courses

The Previous Courses tab lists any prior year class enrollment records Veracross has for the student. Previous year courses are grouped by subject and year to make it easy to see what classes the student has taken so far in each subject and what they might request for next year.

*Note: The Previous Courses tab will only show records for classes that were tracked in Veracross. Schools in their first year of using Veracross will not have prior year class data.

Current Schedule

The Current Schedule tab opens a new tab and shows the student’s current PDF schedule (as set by the Scheduling Reference Date system parameter).

View Only Mode

When course requests in the student portal are set to “Read Only”, students are unable to edit or add new requests in their portal. Instead, they can see a list of their current requests showing the following information:

• Enrolled: displays a check-mark if the student has been scheduled for the course
• Course: name of the course they requested
• Notes: any notes that have been entered by the student, teacher or administration
• Priority: the priority level of each request