If you’ve already promoted your students to the new school year, you’ve probably already copied over your subject/course offering as well. And one of the things you should do before you start enrolling students into subjects/courses is to update your subject/course offering. This is the third installment of the QuickSchools Summer Series.

Step 1:  Adding / Inviting New Teachers

Before you begin, you should make sure you’ve added / invited new teachers to your QuickSchools account. You’ll need to do this if the new teachers will be teaching subjects / courses for the new school year. Just click on the “Add Teacher” button from the “Teachers” listing:

You will need school admin privileges to add/edit teacher records. Be sure NOT to remove the old teachers yet. You’ll do this at the end, AFTER you’ve re-assigned their subjects to new teachers.

Step 2:  Reviewing your course / subject offering

Before we change the courses that you’re offering for the new school year, it helps to review what you have at the moment. And there’s an excellent report we can run for this, called the “Subject Enrollment Summary” report. You should run the “Subject Enrollment by Grade” format for best results:

If you don’t have access to the report, you’ll need to check with your school admin. It’s also most likely on the third page of your list of reports. When you “View” the report, it will look something like this:

After making your changes, you can always re-run this report, to make sure the course / subject offering for the new school year is accurate and correct.

Step 3: Updating your course / subject offering

You can update your course offering by going to the “Subjects” > “Subject Setup” menu (for Colleges, the menu is labelled “Courses” > “Course Setup”):

Note here, that subjects displayed on this screen are from the Activated Academic Term, so be sure you have the correct term activated before making changes.

If you click on “Edit” next to an existing subject, you can do the following:

• Change the subject name / abbreviation
• Re-assign the subject to another teacher (you can assign to multiple teachers too)
• If you have credits enabled, you can change the credit hours

You can also create additional subjects and sections as well. Remember that when creating new sections, you should use the same subject name but use a different subject abbreviation. Once you’ve made your changes, it’s usually a good idea to re-run the report (from Step 1 above) to make sure all the changes have properly taken effect.

Step 4: Enrolling students into courses

There are essentially 2 ways of enrolling students into subjects. If all students in the same grade level are taking the same subjects, you can use the “Subjects” > “Subject Enrollment” screen to enroll students:

Simply expand the subject by clicking “+ Enroll Students“, and use the check boxes to enroll (or unenroll) students into the subject. The screen only shows students in the current grade level, or currently enrolled students on the screen. To add more students to the list, use the “Enroll students from another grade” section.

If each student is taking different courses (like high school / college), then you’re better off doing this via the student record. Just go to the “Students” listing, and open up a student record:

You will need school admin privileges to edit enrollment for a students. Just click on the “Edit” link next to the list of subjects / courses. The following screen will appear:

You can then select the grade level from the dropdown, and then enroll the student into specific subjects from that grade level, and that’s pretty much it.

Again, it’s typically a good idea to review the “Subject Enrollment by Grade” report, to make sure you have the correct number of students in each class. As long as the student is enrolled into the correct subjects, the student will appear in the correct gradebooks, and the correct subjects will appear in the student’s report cards.

Step 5: Removing resigned teachers

Once you’ve completed updating the subject offering, you can now remove the teachers who have left the school, by opening the teacher record, and selecting “Teacher has resigned”.

You should avoid deleting teachers, especially if the teacher is linked to valid subjects and gradebooks from previous semesters.

Conclusion

Once you’ve updated the course offering, and enrolled students into classes, you’re essentially ready to start grading. Each subject will have its own Gradebook. And when you create new report card marking periods for the academic term, each student will have the appropriate subjects displayed. You’re now also ready to set up schedules and subject-based attendance.

Please do check out the other topics discussed in the QuickSchools Summer Series. You might find some of them useful for the summer. And as always, come chat with us if you have any questions.