Subject Management

Subjects are perhaps the most important entity in Accelerus as they determine what is being assessed, when it is being assessed, when and how it is to be reported upon.

The following aspects of subjects should be noted:

•	Subjects are not a learning area or discipline such as English or Science. Instead Year 4 English, Year 7 Science, or Middle School Sport might be subjects, ie they are specific units of study, undertaken by particular students for a particular period.

•	Subjects are at the top of a hierarchy of entities.

Each subject is associated with one or many classes, which are a subset of subjects. They determine who is being assessed in the particular subject and by which teachers. For example, the Year 8 English subject will have classes assigned to it, each taught by a teacher. Even if there is only one Year 8 group at the school, the subject must have a class.

Students are then enrolled in the classes of the subject.

Therefore, subjects have classes which have student enrolments.

•	Subjects have assessment items which determine what students are to be assessed and reported upon, across all classes of the subject.

•	Subjects are added to the report runs in which they are being reported on. Therein, the format of the student reports and the templates of each subject, are determined.

•	Comment banks may be associated with subjects, to facilitate the writing of comments by teachers of the subjects.

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Because subjects are such pivotal entities in Accelerus, they contain a large number of fields and tabs. Many of these tabs and the processes available from them are covered in other sections, especially the very import aspect of assessment item management. However, the table below gives an overview of the different fields and features of this window. Full field specifications for subjects are available by clicking here.

Feature

The cycles currently selected in the Academic Cycle Selector appear in the top right corner of the subject's title bar. It is important that the correct cycles are selected before opening subjects, especially if your subjects are very similar across cycles, so that work is not carried out in the wrong record.

The Subject Details button allows you to hide the detail fields in the top half of the window, a very handy feature when adding assessment items in the table below and needing as much space as possible for these. Reclicking the button will redisplay the fields.

When subjects are added, they must be assigned to one of the currently selected cycles.

For example, the subject above has been opened in Sem2, 2011, ie two cycles are in force. However, the actual subject belongs to Sem2 of those two cycles, as shown in its Academic Cycle field.

You cannot have two subjects in overlapping cycles with the same code. 05ARMU can only be found in either 2011 or Sem2. However, there may be a subject with the same code in Sem1, as Sem1 and Sem2 of 2011 do not overlap.

A good system of coding records is nowhere more important than with subjects. A well thought out coding system will make finding and selecting subjects much easier, for the many different processes where this is necessary. Also, data will be able to be analysed much more effectively.

Subjects not only have a name, which is a mandatory field, they may optionally have a subject description. This is a free form text field of unlimited length that may be used to describe the subject, what was taught, etc. It is usually only used where this type of unit description is inserted into student reports.

Every subject must be assigned a subject level. Subject levels are defined by the Accelerus administrator, in the School Settings window, when Accelerus is first set up. These may be numbers, eg 0 to 12, or a combination of numbers and alphanumerics such as Prep, 8-10, VET, etc.

Subject levels should not be confused with year levels. Year level is a cohort type, with students being assigned to their appropriate year level cohort group each year. Students from any year level may undertake subjects in any subject level. For example, a year 10 student may study a year 11 or 12 subject, or you may have a subject level called Middle in which all students in year levels 8, 9 and 10 are enrolled.

Subject roles may be defined by each school in the Security window so that a teacher who has a management role or who oversee particular subjects may be assigned to their subjects. Various permissions are given to the roles. For example, a subject coordinator role may be allowed to modify and view all of the results for students in classes of the subjects they coordinate.

It is not mandatory to have any subject level roles or, if there are roles, to assign anyone to them.

If the Is Closed box is checked the subject, and all of the records that depend upon it, cannot be edited by any users, ie classes, enrolments, assessment items, etc. Further than this, it never appears in Quick Find and does not appear by default in any Explorers.

It will be excluded from most processes in Accelerus also. For example, if a subject has been closed, where teachers are using offline files, the classes of the subject will be removed from these when the teachers next synchronise.

Closing of subjects is not recommended unless in exceptional circumstances. Instead, at the end of a cycle, the subject's assessment items may be locked to prevent teachers from making changes, or the whole cycle may be locked to prevent accidental editing. The subject itself is still visible, however.

Locking in bulk, should it be required, is available from the Subject Explorer.

Subjects have two windows and you may switch views between these. Clicking the icon in the top right corner of the subject's details window allows you to move to the subject's results window where all of the results for the subject are displayed, in the exact same way as the results window appears for teachers when working on their classes. All of the features of the class results window apply equally to the subject window.

Therefore, those who have been given a school or subject role that allows them to modify results may do so on a subject by subject basis from here.

When the structure and templates for report runs are being set up, slots are created to determine the order in which subjects within a student's reports are to be printed.The Report Template Slot field is an optional field but, if used, may make template creation quicker. When setting up the report run, subjects may be added automatically to the slot nominated as the default in their subject window. They may, however, be added to any slot in any report run, if you wish.

Subjects have five tabs of data:

•	The Assessment Items tab is where all of the details of what is assessed in the subject, across all classes of the subject, are added and modified. Each row is one item of assessment. Student results stored in these assessment items are then able to be printed on reports.

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Teachers may set up assessment items that apply to a particular class to store their own data for the assessment of students. They can only be added by individual teachers when in their own class records. All of the class assessment items that have been added by teachers of the class are displayed in the Class Assessment Items tab. These items may not be included in student reports produced centrally, only in reports that teachers may set up in their class results windows.

•	The Classes tab lists all of the classes that belong to the subject. It is not only a view-only table, but allows classes to be added directly to it.

•	The Report Templates tab allows you to know which report runs subjects have been added to and in which portions, as well as listing all of the templates that have been created for the particular subject, for each report run.

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The Comment Banks tab allows comment banks to be assigned to the subject so that the teachers of the subject can use them when writing their reports. It will also display any comment banks already assigned, whether via the subject's window or through the comment bank's window where it can be assigned to multiple subjects at once.

Each of the tabs in the subject window has a toolbar contains icons that perform functions applicable to the particular tab. Many of these icons are not available unless the user has been granted appropriate permissions.

The toolbars include the standard icons and methods for deleting records from tables.

A subject, as far as Accelerus is concerned, is a unique unit of study with a lifespan. For example, it could be an annual subject, a semester-based unit, part of a six week rotation or a trimester in length.

Each school must determine the lifespans of their subjects and these greatly influence the way that a school sets up its academic cycle structure in the School Settings window.

The following question needs to be asked when deciding on the academic cycles of your subjects:

❖	For what period of time does the subject have the same students in the same classes, with the same teacher, being taught the same subject matter and reported on in the same manner?

Schools may, and often do, have a combination of cycles for their different subjects: you may have some that are annual, some semester and others term-based, for example.

If you add your subjects to annual cycles, each year you can have the same set of subjects, if you wish, or a completely different set.

Likewise, if you decide on semester-based cycles, each semester you can have a set of subjects applying to a semester time period. These may be coded identically.

And so on for other types of cycles.

However, you may not have any subjects with the same code in overlapping cycles. For example, you can not have 09TEWW in a semester cycle and an annual cycle in the same year. At any point in time, there can only be one in existence.

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Schools have several options when deciding on the structure of their subjects:

•	Primary schools, generally, stick to annual subjects as students are usually in the same classes with the same teachers all year.

As seen above, all the year 3 to 6 subjects belong to the annual cycle 2011.

•	In Secondary schools, there can be quite a a combination of different timespans, eg for core subjects compared to electives.

In these cases, many schools prefer to treat all their subjects as separate semester units, even the subjects that, strictly speaking, are annual.

This has advantages:

➢	The data is usually coming from a timetable that is already semesterised.

➢	There is greater consistency and it not so difficult trying to keep up with what runs for how long.

➢	It is much easier to set up assessment items as they may be consistent across all subjects rather than having to add a suffix to the end of them for each report run to make them unique. They and the subjects may be rolled over easily using the Rollover window.

➢	Setting up the report run and templates is much more efficient as the templates may be copied for reuse each semester. They do not have to be recreated as the assessment item codes in them are the same each semester.

As seen above, all of the secondary subjects belong to Sem1.

Once subjects have been assigned to an academic cycle, it is not possible to simply change this via a subject's record.

You may reimport the subjects using a CSV file to reassign the subjects to another academic cycles, but only if you are reimporting them into a cycle that is a child of the original one. For example, if subjects were imported into 2011 and you want them to be assigned to Sem2, you may reimport them into Sem2. The preprocess stage will display a message such as that below and allow you to change the subjects.

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It will not allow you to do it the other way, however, ie up the cycle tree. You can only delete the subjects via the Subject Explorer which means all dependent data will also be deleted, eg classes, enrolments, assessment items and results for the subjects. You must then reimport them into the correct cycle. Alternatively, correct it in next year's reports.

It is highly recommended that you set up a consistent coding system for your subjects and classes, or work with your school’s timetabler on setting up a consistent system between the two databases. This will make setting up Accelerus much more efficient, will make finding and selecting subjects much easier, and will mean that future analysis of the data will be much more effective.

In many cases schools are constrained in their ability to code subjects as their own administration packages have code limitations or they are required to use certain codes by government bodies.

However, where possible, consider a coding system such as the following for subjects:

The first two digits indicate the subject level, eg 07, 10.

The next two digits indicate the learning area, eg EN, AR, MA, TE, etc.

This is particularly important for the arts and technology areas where the subject names are very different. Having such a code will make it easy to identify the learning area of the subject, and allow all subjects in the learning area to be selected easily.

The next two digits, possibly optional, indicate the actual subject, eg ARDR, to indicate Drama (DR), being part of the Arts (AR).

Core subjects such as English may not need these digits, eg 07EN may be sufficient, or you may want to code subjects 07ENEN to be consistent in the number of digits.

Therefore, we would have subjects such as 07ARDR and 07ARMU. All of the year 7 subjects could be easily selected as they all begin with 07. All of the Art learning area subjects could be selected as their 3rd and 4th digits would be AR, and so forth.

A class is a subgroup of a subject and, as such, it is best to code the classes based on their parent subject. For example, A, B, C could be added to the end of the subject code to identify the individual classes, eg 07ENGA, 07ENGB, etc.

If you need to make large scale changes to your subject and class coding systems, the Bulk Code Change window in Accelerus is very useful. It allows you to import a CSV file that contains a column for the old and new code and Accelerus will make the changes to the records in the currently selected academic cycles.

Subjects do not necessarily have to be real subjects.

For example, in a secondary school, if you want to produce a Home Group teacher report, then you may need to create a pseudo subject called Home Group. Another example of a pseudo subject would be a subject in which the Principal or a Subschool Head writes a comment for each student.

In order to be able to achieve the above, a subject, with classes is required. This pseudo subject will be treated in the same way as all others: you would set up assessment items for it, create templates for it, assign it a report slot, etc.

Often, it is not necessary to have different pseudo subjects for each year level. You could set up a subject level of All in the School Settings window, and assign this to a pseudo subject that applies across all levels, eg a Principal comment or Home Group subject. The classes and enrolments for this subject would be equivalent to the actual home groups or on a year level basis.

In order to be able to have one pseudo subject in these types of of cases:

•	The assessment items must be identical across all year levels.

•	The report to be produced must be the same across year levels.

If this is not the case, you need to have a pseudo subject for each different combination of assessment items and reporting needs.

Often in a primary school, the same teacher teaches most of the subject areas for the same class or home group of students, with a few other teachers taking the students for specialist subjects. Rather than have a subject for each learning area taken by the home group teacher, one pseudo subject may be created for each year level of students.

Classes are added to these subjects, based on the home groups of the students.

For example, you could create subjects for 1HG, 2HG, 3HG, etc, with classes being created for each of these, based on the home groups. Subject 3HG might have 3A, 3B and 3C as its classes.

These home group subjects would include the assessment of all learning areas assessed by the home group teacher.

In addition, specialist subjects would be created for the other learning areas, eg 3IT, 3MUS, etc, each of these with their set of classes. Of course the students in each of these would be the same as those in the home group pseudo subjects.

When a primary school goes down this path, the Bulk Enrolment window is a very handy tool to enrol students into their pseudo subjects.

Schools in the Victorian Catholic and Government sectors may have such subjects, called home group summary subjects, created for them automatically via the importing of a student details XML file.

Working with subjects

Closing and restricting subjects

Subject results

Assessment item management

The Subject and Class Generator

Class and enrolment management