Student Admin - Sections Feature

Placing Agency Related Guide (PARG)

Summary:
Students can be assigned to sections in the Enrollment screen, as a way to categorize students according to geographical preferences, educational needs, or team assignments. Sections can then be used to filter or sort students in the Enrollment or Assignment screens, and can also be used during manual or automated matching.

Background
When working with large cohorts of students, educational programs may wish to allocate students into "sub cohorts" or sections within a cohort. For example:

Students may be assigned to teams at the beginning of a course (e.g. for carpooling or projects), and can stay in that team or be assigned to another team for the next course;
Students may be asked for their preference of geographic area or zone for an upcoming placement (e.g. "1^st choice north shore") and can then be assigned to a Section for all students preferring that zone;
Students may be categorized into Sections representing different levels of skill or experience, so that group placement will have students with the same skills level or a mix of levels, as appropriate for managing learning objectives or instructor workload.

Options:

You can allocate students to a section once and leave it unchanged throughout the program, or you can change a student's allocated section number at any time. For example:
- - - If you allocate a student to Section 1 in their first course, he/she will be allocated to Section 1 for all courses. The section allocation can be changed at any time.
    - For structured Cohorts, changing a student's section in any course will update their section assignment in all courses, including past courses – however their assignment to past placements will NOT be affected. For unstructured cohorts, section changes in one course don't affect the allocation in other courses.

Allocating Students to a Section On the Enrollment Worksheet, click: Edit All to update several students (if students are not yet copied to a worksheet, you can edit an individual student by clicking their Editicon.)
2. In edit mode, select a section number from the dropdown for each student. HSPnet offers section numbers based on the number of enrolled students (1 section for every 6 students); you may need to use only a few of the available sections to categorize students by skill/experience level or geographic zone. 3. Click Save All when done.
4. In addition to individual section allocations via step 2 above, two options exist for mass update of section assignments in the Action dropdown: Clear section assignments – for selected students, this changes their section assignment to blank; Randomly assign students to sections – displays a numeric field (default 2 sections) for dividing the class into the number of sections selected.
Managing Sections in Enrollment The normal view on the Enrollment worksheet is to sort students alphabetically by last name. Students with no section number will sort to the top.
5. To sort by section number: Click: Sec a. Click the Sec link once to sort in ascending order (lowest to highest). b. Click the Sec link again to sort in descending order (highest to lowest).
6. To filter the list, select a section number from the Current View filter or choose "No Section" to filter to students who are not yet allocated to a section. Use the section filter in combination with other HSPnet tools, such as the Action drop down list filter, to determine which students to copy to worksheet (Group or Individual).
Managing Sections in the Assignment Worksheet Once students are allocated to sections in Enrollment, the sections can be used later to manage cohorts and to streamline the process of assigning students to placements in the Assignment Worksheet. Click the GoTo button for an Assignment Worksheetor (Click the Sec link to sort the student list (see step 5) so students from the same section can be selected together and be assigned simultane