A Brief Primer on Merged CoursePlus Sites and Enrollments
Given the wide range of purposes served by course sections at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, it's no wonder that there's a need to simplify the CoursePlus experience for faculty, TAs, and students who are split across multiple sections of a single course number. As a result of this need to unify the CoursePlus experience, CoursePlus automatically merges some course section enrollments into other sections. This post explains why and when this happens.
Some section numbers indicate an entirely different modality and experience for students in a class compared to other sections of the same course number. .8x sections, for example, are for fully online courses, which can be quite different in content and schedule from their face-to-face counterparts. .11 sections in the summer institute are highly compressed courses, while their .01 section counterparts during the regular academic term follow the full eight-week term schedule. However, there are a now a wide number of course sections that simply indicate a different modality for registration purposes while the content, schedule, and assessments — the core part of the student experience in those sections — is exactly the same.
To simplify administration and improve the student experience in these sections differentiated solely by modality, CoursePlus automatically merges most section enrollments into a single CoursePlus site. This allows faculty and TAs to manage all students from within a single section, which reduces error, improves consistency across sections, and facilitates discussion and interaction across sections.
Listed below are the rules by which course sections are merged in CoursePlus.
- .41 section registrations are automatically merged into the corresponding .01 section.
- .49 section registrations are automatically merged into the corresponding .11 (Summer Institute) section.
- .43 section registrations are automatically merged into the corresponding .13 (Winter Institute) section.
- .84 section registrations are automatically merged into the corresponding .80 section.
There are exceptions to these rules, where a faculty member has requested that a section not be merged for a specific purpose. There are also a handful of .41 section registrations that are merged into the corresponding .60 section when no .01 section is available.
Additionally, there are multi-part courses with different course numbers that take place over multiple academic terms but use a single CoursePlus site for all parts of the course. In these cases, there is an indicator on the course syllabus page that a different CoursePlus site will be used for that specific course and section number:
When Do Enrollments Get Merged for These Courses and Sections?
Enrollments in multi-part courses with different course numbers that take place over multiple academic terms are merged as soon as that registration is processed by CoursePlus.
Prior to 2023, conflicts in how course numbers are reused at the Bloomberg School of Public Health prevented the merging of CoursePlus enrollments in courses with the same course number but different section numbers until just before the start of each academic term. Starting in 2023, however, the merging of student registrations occurs as soon as that registration is processed by CoursePlus. There is no longer a delay for processing those registrations.
We hope this primer on how registrations across are merged into a single CoursePlus site has been helpful. If you have questions about how course sections are merged in CoursePlus, CTL Help is happy to answer your questions.