Entering Course Requests in the Teacher Portal

Overview

Course Requests can optionally be entered in the teacher portal if your school allows teachers to enter Course Requests for their students or advisees for the upcoming year. Teachers who have the class permission role of additional teacher also have access to enter Course Requests for their students and advisees.

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 Course Request Entry

To place a link to the course request page from the teacher portal, create a button in the portal and then link the correct system shortcut link to the button. The two options for system shortcut links are as follows:

• {system:course_request} for version 2 of the course request page
• {system:course_request_v1} for version 1 of the course request page

Learn more about creating portal buttons and building portal screens.

Teacher Portal Entry

When viewing the Course Requests page, teachers can enter course requests through the teacher portal for their students and advisees. In addition, faculty have the ability to see a student’s prior courses, the student’s current schedule and the student’s credit report.

Course Requests

The course request page allows teachers to add course requests for their students or advisees by searching for courses. Using the drop down menu in the upper right side of the page, teachers can choose which of their students, advisees or homeroom students to enter course requests for. When a student is selected, the page will automatically refresh to open that student’s course requests.

To add a new course request for a student, click on the blue “Add Course Request” button to open up a menu. From here, select the Subject, Course, Priority, Term, and Level. The teacher can also mark the request as approved and also designate that it is the recommended course for the student to take. Notes may also be saved for these course requests in the Notes field. When it is completed, click the grey “Add Course Request” button.

Once a course request has been added, the following information about the request can be modified. These changes are saved in real time.

• Priority: The drop-down for whether the course being requested is the student’s first, second, or third choice for courses available. If the student does not have a preference, “Not Specified” may be chosen.
• Term: Used to specify the grading period in which the student wants to take this course.
• 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. This field appears as a blank box in the center of the request.
• Recommended: Manually checked off 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 editable in the teacher portal and can also be updated by Administrators from within Axiom. 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.
• Remove Request: Clicking on the red “Remove Request” text deletes the course request.

When a teacher is finished entering course requests for a student, they can indicate the student’s course request list is complete by checking off the flag under the student’s name on the page saying “This student’s course requests are complete”. This checkbox is meant to keep track of which students have finalized course request lists and which still need to completed. The checkbox will be automatically reset (unchecked) for all students when the Start School Year procedure is run.

Scheduler School Year

Course requests entered via the student/faculty portal will always be for “next year,” but which requests display depends on the “Scheduler School Year” parameter. Updating this parameter should be understood as a general requirement before beginning any scheduling project, including course requests.

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 be recommended 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.

Credit Report

The credit report summarizes how many credits a student has earned so far by subject and how many required credits are left for the student to take. Subject areas in which the student has fulfilled all required credits will be grayed out.

Note: The credit report will only work if the number of required credits has been configured for each subject on the Subject List.

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).