Course Instances, Course Aliases and Courses
From ReservesDirect: Open Source EReserves System
There’s a bit of complexity in registration around Courses, CourseInstances, and CourseAliases. This complexity has resulted in some confusion in the past. Hopefully this document can clear that up a bit.
A Course is something that a department identifies with a course number and name. The department typically offert the Course many times over many terms. For instance, “English 101: Composition Basics” is a Course. It’s offered by the English department; it has a course number and a standard title. It’ll be taught many times over many terms, and sometimes even in multiple sections in a single term. “English 2480: Special Topics” is also a Course. The department might not teach it every semester, and when they do it might cover different particular topics each time. Still, though, the department offers it as a single course with a single course number and a single uniform title shared by all instances of the class.
A CourseInstance is what a student might think of as a class. We might have even called it a Class, except that word has special meaning in a number of programming languages. When a student goes to Jones Hall room 184 at 10 a.m. every Tuesday and Thursday during the fall semester of her freshman year, that’s a Course Instance. Reserves Direct doesn’t store the class’s weekly schedule, but it does store the term and year for the class as well as the items held on reserve for the class.
Each CourseInstance will also have at least one topic that’s being taught. Our example class might be “English 101: Composition Basics.” That might be one of several English 101 sections that term. Alternately, it might be “English 2480: Special Topics in 20th Century Irish Poetry,” which is cross-listed in the course catalog as “History 3428: Ireland in the 20th Century Through Poetry.” CourseAliases describe this many-to-many relationship between Courses and Course Instances, where a single Course may be taught many times in a single term, or where a single CourseInstance may be listed under several different Courses.
In ReservesDirect students register for CourseAliases, and instructors teach them. If English 101 is being taught as multiple sections in a particular semester, then each has one CourseAlias with a different section number. If the Dr Smith is teaching English 2480 this term, and it’s cross-listed as History 3428, that single CourseInstance has two CourseAliases. Students might sign up for either one of these, but either way they’re going to Jones 184 every Tuesday or Thursday morning at 10. Since section number and course name are stored in the CourseAlias, each alias in both of these examples can have different section numbers, different topics, or even entirely different names.
