Portal - Self Scheduling

About

The ‘Self Scheduling’ feature is designed to optimize the flow of course-based enrollment by allowing students to schedule themselves into new courses that meet a certain predefined criteria.

Getting Started

  • To enable the student self scheduling feature, there are two new settings that need to be enabled.
  • 1. On the “Campus Detail” form, there is a new campus setting called “Allow Student Self Scheduling”. This option has to be checked to allow the campus to use this feature.

  • 2. On the “Authorization” form, there is a new authorizable action for the “Course Sign-Off” form. This action has be to authorized to allow certain roles to use this feature
  • Note: this action is enabled for MDUs by default

Using the Self Scheduling feature

Step 1 - Instructor Actions

  1. When the student completes their first course in a program, the instructor will sign it off as usual on the Course Sign-Off form.
  2. Next, the instructor begins to opt-in to self scheduling by staying on the Course Sign-Off form and selecting the next course that the student should enroll into. For the new course, the instructor should set a start date correlating to when the student should begin showing on the roll. The start date here will also become the start date of the student's new schedule details when enrollment is confirmed in Step 2. After setting a start date, the "Allow Self-Schedule" checkbox will be enabled if the instructor has the appropriate permissions, and Northstar can detect that a previous course was recently completed. Only the most recently completed course's schedule will be rolled forward into the next course. Note: The start date cannot be set more than 7 days into the future.
  3. After clicking 'Save', Northstar will review if the self-scheduling option is valid for the student. If the form saves successfully, then Self-Scheduling has been enabled and the instructor can direct the student to login to the Portal to pay and complete enrollment. Saving this option successfully will also end the students previous enrollment as of their completion date, if they had not already reached the end of their scheduled stop date. However, they will not be enrolled into the new course until the student completes the process online.
    1. Northstar will check the most recent completed course and the student’s schedule of that specific course. If the student did not have schedule of that completed course, the Self-Schedule will fail.
    2. It will then check whether the new course has course sessions that match the recently completed course’s sessions. If no matching course sessions are found, self-scheduling will not be allowed. In order for a course to qualify, the tuition must be set-up as "Pay Up-Front" and the Session Type, Days Offered, Times Offered, and Room must match exactly between the old and new sessions.

Step 2 – Student Actions

  1. When the student logs into the Portal a yellow notification banner will be displayed on every page they visit, alerting them that a new course enrollment is available. The notification also displays on their Dashboard, at the top of the Quick Actions section.

  2. Clicking the notification will take the student to the Self Scheduling page where they can view the details of the newly available course.
  3. If the student's previous course was not in any way paid for by a sponsorship, then the student will be required to pay the full tuition and fee amounts for the class in order to register. However, if the previous course was paid in any amount by a sponsorship, then the Portal will allow the student to complete enrollment without having to pay first. After AutoPay has processed, if the student still owes any tuition or fee amount then they will be shown their amount due and can complete payment online.

Reports

[E] - Portal - Self Scheduling

This report is intended to make it easy to review the current status and overall usage of the self scheduling feature.

  • The Pending parameter will only include students who have been marked as eligible to enroll by the instructor, but haven't yet completed the process online.
  • The Owing Balance parameter will only include students that have not paid the full amount yet, likely because they had a partial covering sponsorship.