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The first step of working with a new term with Series25 is to prepare its sections in your student information system. This is the basis for all your future scheduling work.
You don't have to complete all your setup at once. Remember, the academic cycle is a cycle – you will be moving back and forth between your SIS and 25Live, and any updates you make in one system will be carried over to the other. But every cycle has a starting point, and this is ours.
To prepare data for use with Series25, you'll want to visit all the following steps:
Add Sections to Your Term
The most common way to add sections is to roll them over from a previous term, but you might also import them from a file or even create them manually. However you do it, you'll end up with a full term's worth of sections ready to be placed into rooms.
Inevitably, you'll need to change something: remove extra sections, add new ones, or change meeting pattern times. It's best to have as much of this done as possible before you use LYNX to import data into 25Live, but you'll always have the opportunity to make changes later.
Verify Meeting Patterns Are Complete
As an event-based scheduling platform, 25Live must know when everything is taking place. Therefore, it can't import a section unless its meeting patterns are complete. (If a section has multiple meeting patterns and some are incomplete, then LYNX will skip the incomplete ones.) This means each meeting pattern needs:
- Start time
- End time
- At least one day of the week
If you have some sections where this information is deliberately left blank (such as independent study courses) then you will probably want to configure your extract sets to exclude them from LYNX imports.
Establish Cross-Listed/Combined Groups
Cross-listed sections (called "combined sections" in Campus Solutions) are treated as a single unit for purposes of 25Live scheduling, which allows you to double-book them without generating a conflict warning. It's best to configure these as early as possible due to the downstream effect they have on scheduling other classes.
When setting up a cross-listed group in your SIS, CollegeNET recommends that you enter an attendance/registration value for that group. Otherwise, LYNX will do its best to interpret the correct headcount for the group as a whole, based on its configurations. (Example: if a section with 20 students is bound to another section with 20 students, should it be placed in a room with 20 seats or 40?)
If you want sections to meet together as if they were cross-listed but don't want to configure them in the SIS, you can set this up in LYNX later.
Add Preassigned Locations
25Live and the Optimizer will help you with most of the heavy lifting when it comes to finding rooms for your classes, but sometimes you don't need it to. If there are sections that you know for certain should be placed in a specific room, go ahead and assign them to the meeting patterns now in your SIS. This will save you time and let you use Series25 to help you make choices that are less obvious.
Typical situations like this include:
- Science labs, athletic classes, and others that use specialized equipment
- Campuses where there is only one auditorium big enough for large lectures
- Sections that require specific accommodations for an instructor or student
Add Location Requirements
If a section has restrictions about where it may be taught but you don't want to preassign it to a specific location, then you can use location requirements to narrow it down. The Optimizer will factor these requirements into its placement.
Each SIS represents these requirements in a different way:
- Banner: Room Attributes
- Campus Solutions: Room Characteristics
- Colleague: Classroom Equipment Codes
- Workday: N/A
These elements are mapped against your LYNX translation tables and converted to feature preferences in 25Live.
Add Instructors
Instructors are optional in Series25, but you can use them to set up back-to-back binding, which ensures a teacher doesn't have to change rooms when they teach sections in consecutive time blocks. Instructors will be added to 25Live events as contact roles if you enable it in LYNX, and their names will be printed in event descriptions regardless.
If you list multiple instructors for a single section, LYNX translation rules will determine which of them are listed in 25Live.
(Workday/Ethos Only) Set Term to Auto-Initialize
The connection with Workday and Ethos requires that you manually initialize a term code whenever there are certain changes to a course listing. You can skip this step if you set up the term code to auto-initialize in the API Configurations area of LYNX Settings.