Academic Categories and Cycles

Accelerus is not constrained by years or semesters, but gives schools the flexibility to define their own academic cycle time frames, eg calendar year, financial year, bi-annual, semester, term, year 12 semesters, trimester, etc.

You may create as many academic cycle categories and the cycles that belong to each of these categories as required to suit your school.

Academic cycles are set up and displayed in the School Settings window, accessed from the Tool menu. This window is only available to Accelerus administrators who have the permission Administer System in the Security window.

This window is made up of two panes: the top one is where the school's academic cycle categories are set, and the other where the actual cycles that belong to each category are added.

Set AcademicCyclesTab

The category of Perpetual is mandatory and created automatically when an Accelerus database is created or converted from MarkBook. Some records in Accelerus are perpetual, ie they apply to all years and time spans in the database, eg marking schemes, analyses, comment banks, and even students and teachers.

To Perpetual, each school adds the categories that apply at the school, the most common academic cycle categories being Annual, Semester and Term. Then, for each category, the actual cycles are defined. For example, if you have an Annual category, its cycles will be 2010, 2011, 2012 and so on.

Categories can have sub-categories. For example, an Annual category may have Semesters as a subcategory, rather than Semester being a separate category. This is possible when the subcategories are fully contained within the parent category, eg a year contains two semesters within its timeframe.

What determines the types of categories you set up is the lifespan or timeframe of your school’s data, most notably three types of records. For each type of record, you should ask the following sorts of questions to determine your school's academic category needs:

•	Subjects and their classes

Do the subjects go for the whole year, with the same students and teachers in the same classes? If so, the lifespan of the subjects could be Annual.

If the subject or its classes change each semester, then you will require a Semester category, or even a Term category if they change each term.

It may be that the students in the classes do not change but the subject and/or class name or descriptions change between reports, eg you may have a SOSE subject but in semester 1 the report needs to be headed Geography and in semester 2 it is called History. In this case, the subjects would need to be in semester units and not an Annual category.

You may have a combination of categories for your subjects, if you wish. As shown below, some subjects are annual and belong to the 2011 cycle, whereas others belong to the Semester category labelled Sem2.

Set AcademicCyclesSubjects

On the other hand, you may choose to add all annual and semester subjects to a Semester category, having two sets of semester subjects, or units, in each year, rather than managing a combination of annual and semester subjects.

•	Cohort memberships

What is the lifespan of a student's membership in any of their cohort groups?

Usually schools have a Year Level cohort type and students are in the year level groups for a year, ie an Annual category is required. This may be the same for other cohorts such as home groups.

On the other hand, your students may be in vertical home groups and remain in the same group for their whole time at the school. In this case, this cohort could be Perpetual, for which there is already a category.

Keep in mind that, if a cohort type is categorised as perpetual, it is expected that students never move cohort groups. If they do, when they are changed, there will be no historical record of their having done so. It will appear that they have been in the same cohort group perpetually.

Also, if you have teachers assigned to these perpetual cohorts, it is assumed that these do not change.

Therefore, you may consider assigning such a cohort type to an Annual category, and rolling over the memberships each year, changing just those that are different from the previous year.

•	Student custom properties

What lifespan do the student custom properties required by your school have? Are they perpetual, in the case of properties like Ethnicity, or do the values of the custom properties for each student change, eg each year or each semester, etc?

Once you have determined your academic category needs, the individual cycles that apply to each category are created, eg to the Annual category you would add the cycles of 2011, 2012, etc.

Schools in the Victorian Catholic and Government sectors must have an academic cycle category in order to produce the AusVELS reports. It must be coded YEAR, with the name Annual.

In order to demonstrate the way the academic categories and cycles may be set up, take this example school:

•	The school wishes to record the Aboriginal status of the student as a custom student property.

•	Students are members of the same Home Group for a calendar year.

•	Subjects are generally run as semester units, within the calendar year.

•	Some technology and art subjects have classes that run in trimesters, eg Drama in trimester 1, Visual Arts in trimester 2 and Dance in trimester 3.

In this case, the school would set up as follows:

•	An Annual category.

•	Two subcategories of Annual: Semester and Trimester, ie these are sibling categories, both children of Annual.

•	In the cycles, each Annual cycle, eg 2011, 2012, would have its three trimester and two semester cycles.

Set AcademicCyclesTrimesterEg

There are some rules that guide which way a school sets up its academic categories and cycles, the main ones being:

•	Subcategory dates must be contained within the dates of their parent category.

For example, in order for Semester to be a subcategory of Annual, the start and end dates of each semester cycle must fit within those of the parent annual cycle.

•	The cycles of a category, ie sibling cycles such as semester 1 and semester 2, cannot overlap.

For example, if your school runs a six-weekly cycle of classes that overlap with terms, then they cannot be part of a Term cycle. Another category would need to be created for these.

•	Academic category names, and cycle names within a parent, must be unique.

For example, if you have a Semester category that is a child of Annual, you could name your cycles Sem1 and Sem2. However, if Semester is a child of Perpetual, you would need to set up your semesters with unique names, eg 2011Sem1, 2011Sem2, 2012Sem1, 2012Sem2, and so on.

The Accelerus administrator would set up the school's academic cycle structure as follows, once having decided, what structure is required:

•	Go to the Tools menu and select School Settings.

•	In the Academic Cycles Category pane at the top of the window, click Perpetual.

•	Click the New academic cycle category icon.

Set AcademicCyclesClickPerpetual

•	In the fields that appear to the right of the pane:

➢	Enter a code, using alphanumeric characters or underscore, up to four characters long, eg ANNL, YEAR, etc.

➢	Enter a name for the category, eg Annual, using any characters, up to 20 characters in length.

It is recommended that you keep codes in upper case, but names in proper or sentence case.

Set AcademicCyclesAnnualCat

•	Continue adding categories in the same way, making sure that you click the parent category, to which you want to add a subcategory, before you click the New academic cycle category icon.

For example:

➢	If you want to add a Semester category, as a child of Annual, click Annual and then assign the code and name. Semester will appear indented under Annual, just as Annual is indented under Perpetual.

Set AcademicCyclesSemesterChild

➢	If Semester is to be a sibling of Annual, both children of Perpetual, click Perpetual and then add the Semester category. Semester and Annual will be aligned, both indented under Perpetual.

Set AcademicCyclesSemesterSibling

•	Click the Save icon to save the categories you have set up.

•	In the bottom pane, add cycles to the categories, as follows:

➢	Click the Perpetual category.

➢	Click Add academic cycle icon.

Set AcademicCyclesAddCycle

➢	To right of the Academic Cycles pane, select the category to which the cycle belongs.

There may only be one category, depending on how you have set up the academic categories in the top pane:

In the example below, two academic categories may be selected from. This would be the case where Annual and Semester are siblings of each other. If Semester was a child of Annual, only Annual would be available at this point.

Set AcademicCyclesSelectCategory

➢	Enter the name of the academic cycle, eg 2012, if this is a cycle for the category Annual.

You may use up to 20 characters of any type. However, it is recommended that you keep the names short as they will be displayed in the Academic Cycle Selector and all of the cycles in force at a particular date may not all fit in the display field.

Set AcademicCyclesCycleOneCategory

➢	Skip over the Locked field at this stage.

➢	In the Start Date field, enter the starting date of the cycle you are adding or select it by clicking the Calendar icon.

➢	Repeat this for the End Date field.

➢	Click the Save icon.

•	Continue adding cycles in the same way, making note of the following:

➢	Click the parent category in the bottom pane before you click the New academic cycle icon.

For example, to add 2013 after 2012, you would need to reclick Perpetual. However, if you wanted to add Sem1 as a subcycle of 2012, you would click 2012.

➢	When entering the start and end dates, sibling cycles must not have overlapping dates.

For example, if Sem1 ends on 30 June 2012, Sem2 should start after this.

It is highly recommended when adding dates for cycles that you do not leave gaps between them. Years should go from 1 January to 31 December, for example, In the case of semesters and terms, do not exclude the school holidays but incorporate the holiday dates into the cycles, either at the end of one cycle or the beginning of the other. In this way, anytime you select cycles from the Academic Cycle Selector, you will not have to worry about clicking at a date where there is a gap and, therefore, excluding some cycles.

•	If you have made an error when adding a category or cycle, delete it, using the Delete icon at the bottom of the appropriate pane.

Note, however, that you cannot delete a category that has a subcategory or a cycle. Also, cycles with subcycles cannot be deleted either.

•	If you wish to lock an academic cycle, making any data belonging to it unavailable for editing by any users:

➢	If necessary, open a parent cycle to reveal the cycle you want to lock, eg double click 2011 or click the arrow beside its name, to reveal Sem1 and Sem2.

➢	Click the particular cycle to be locked.

➢	Check the Locked field to the right.

Set AcademicCyclesLockCycle

•	When finished, save the School Settings window and close it.

Once the academic cycles have been set up, you may select the cycles you want in force via the Academic Cycle Selector:

•	Click in the bottom right-hand corner of the Accelerus status bar.

•	Move to the calendar section of the graphic display of cycles and the cursor will become a target.

UI StatusBarAcademicCycleSelectorCursor

•	While holding down the left mouse button, move the cursor:

➢	Up and down to increase or decrease the month and year intervals, as required.

➢	Left and right to move to the section of the calendar and the cycles you require.

•	Move down to the part of the selector that displays the actual cycles graphically, in relation to each other and the calendar, and click the cycle required.

All other cycles that overlap the selected cycle will be selected also.

•	Click anywhere else on the screen to hide the Academic Cycle Selector, and your last selections will appear in the bottom right corner.

There is a date setting in the System Items tab of the School Settings window that controls the academic cycles selected by default when a user logs into Accelerus, whether directly into the database, an offline file, or using Accelerus Web.

What is initially displayed in the Welcome Screen and in Quick Find will reflect the academic cycles selected by default, until the user changes the cycles they wish to view.

Set SystemDefaultDate

Above, in the Default system date field, 1 January 2012 is the default system date. Whatever academic cycles include this date will be selected by default. In this example case, as seen in the Academic Cycle Selector below, 2012 and Sem1 will be the selected cycles, as they both include 1 January 2012.

Set SystemDefaultDateSelector

What is initially displayed in the Welcome Screen and in Quick Find will reflect the academic cycles selected by default, until the user changes the cycles they wish to view.

Set SystemDefaultDate

Set SystemDefaultDateSelector