Note: This is a part of a series on the master data objects that will be created and maintained by admin users.

For more information, see: Creating Sessions‍, How to create a Session using Session Template‍, and Session Scheduler‍.

Overview

Sessions represent the classes for a course. For example, the course BUS101 has a weekly lecture on Mondays, from 8:00 - 9:00 am, alongside hands-on tutorials throughout the week.

We will need to represent this in RIO so that we can assign a faculty member to teach it, find a suitable location to hold it, and allow students to enroll into it.

A Course Offering‍ can have multiple Sessions and each Session can have multiple Session Time‍s. For example: Course BUS101 can have 2 Sessions (Lecture 1, Lecture 2). Let’s say:

• Lecture 1 is scheduled on every Monday from 8:00am - 9:00am.
• Lecture 2 is scheduled on every Wednesday from 1:00pm - 3:00pm.

Students may be required to select either Lecture 1 or Lecture 2, or both. You could describe this in the Session Instructions field on the parent Course Offering, where it will be displayed to students in the enrollment wizard, or you could encode it using Session Rules.

A Session can be categorized as: Recurring, Block, Exam or One-off, and a Course Offering can have multiple Sessions.

Most of the time, you should use the Session Scheduler to create and manage your classes. It is much easier to use than creating and editing the underlying records. However, there may be cases in which you use a 3rd party scheduler which syncs to RIO, in which case please make use of the following documentation.

Record Types

Three types of Session records are supported in RIO.

Class

This is the default Record Type. As the name suggests, this represents the class sessions for a course, thus, the Session will need to be associated (via lookup) with a Course Offering.

Template

Used for creating a template Session (e.g. Mondays at 9-10 am), from which you can use whenever creating other Sessions with the same time. These “building blocks” are particularly useful in the Session Scheduler. Click here for more information about Template record type.

Standalone

This type allows a standalone Session to be directly created without requiring an associated Course Offering. You may have a need to schedule and enroll students into something like a one-off workshop, or other training that may occur throughout the term. This would be difficult to do while relying on a Course Offering.

Standalone sessions are particularly useful for Continuing Education, as you can relate them with a Study Offering instead.

Faculty Management

Faculty can be assigned to a Session in a few different ways, and you can also allow your faculty members to accept (or reject) a Session.

In all cases, an assigned faculty member will have both a Course Connection‍ (with a record type of Faculty, if one does not already exist) and Session Connection (with the Faculty box checked and Faculty Confirmed set to Unconfirmed) record created.

Inherit Primary Faculty

If the faculty member for this Session is also denoted as the Primary Faculty Member on the Course Offering, then on the Session record you can simply check the “Use Course Offering's Primary Faculty” box, and this information will be copied over automatically.

Direct Assignment

By opening the Faculty tab on a Session record, you can use the Faculty Connection Wizard‍ to assign multiple faculty members to the session, and filter them by the qualified faculty roles.

The wizard will highlight the existing qualified faculty for you to quickly select from, or you can search from every faculty member present in RIO. If you select a member of faculty who isn't qualified for this particular course or role, a warning will appear, but you can still choose to proceed if you need.

You can also assign faculty directly to a particular session time. For instance, you may create just one Tutorial session and create two Times for it - one for the class held on Tuesday and another for Thursday. Both classes will have a different supervisor, and so using the wizard you will be able to assign different staff to each day.

Faculty Status

As faculty are able to accept or decline a Session, we need a way to quickly determine Sessions with “unconfirmed” faculty. It is useful to quickly get a list of Sessions where the faculty member has declined, and so you will need to invite another one.

This is managed via the “Faculty Status” field, the value of which is calculated from the related faculty Session Connections.‍ The following table outlines the faculty confirmation status depending on these values.

Generating Bookings

When a Session and its Times has been finalised, its Facility chosen, and Faculty selected, you should proceed to generate the Bookings for it. You do this by setting the “Booking Status” picklist field to “Create/Update Bookings”.

Session and Session Time records merely describe the classes that will be held. Bookings are what actually appear on the calendars for students and faculty, and are what attendance is taken against.

If you have a 10 week lecture, you may have just one Session record and one Session Time record. When you then create the bookings for this session, we would expect to see 10 Booking records be generated, one for each week (unless a holiday has been configured).

Booking records are mostly behind-the-scenes. The calendar uses them alongside the attendance wizards, but there shouldn't be a need to interact with them directly.

The following table outlines the status of a Session record and the associated actions.

Booking Issues

If an issue occurs during the booking process, this will be reported in the “Booking Issue” field. You should consider creating a report on this field in order to monitor errors over time. Generally RIO will report two errors, which are documented as below:

Session Status

Each Session record has its own status, which is automatically determined based on its own values and the values of its parent records. This is mainly used in the enrollment wizard, to determine when a student is allowed to enroll into a session. Much like Course Offering, we have custom metadata available to configure what is allowed at what status.

Via the “Session Status (Override)” field, you are also able to override the automatically generated status with one of your choosing. This may be useful for particular sessions where you may want to ensure enrollment always remains open, even after the close date defined on the course offering.

The possible Status values are:

• Draft
• Not Started
• Pre-enrollment Opened
• Enrollment Opened
• Enrollment Closed
• Running
• Completed
• Cancelled

Please note that the global picklist is shared with the “Course Offering Status” field in Course Offering object.

The status is a formula which takes the following fields into account:

• Term’s Enrollment Open Date and Enrollment Close Date
• Term’s Session Open Date/Time and Session Close Date/Time
• Course Offering’s Pre-enrollment Open Date/Time
• Course Offering’s Enrollment Open Date/Time and Enrollment Close Date
• Course Offering’s Start Date and End Date
• Session’s Pre-enrollment Open Date/Time
• Session’s Enrollment Open Date/Time and Enrollment Close Date
• Session’s Start Date and End Date
• Session’s Booking Status
• Session's Session Status Override

Consult the following table for a reference on how the status is determined, and what might be causing an unexpected value:

Session Delivery

Grading Students

In the Session record page, the ‘Students’ tab contains the grading component, whereby admin/faculty can grade students' assignments and exams for the related Course.‍

See also:

• RIO Ed - Session Grading (Aura)‍
• Grading Period Type and Setting
• Grade Criteria, Grade, and Term Grade

Attendance Submission

When Attendance Submission = “Required All”:

• All student attendance records must be marked.
• If any attendance is missing, an error message “All student attendances must be entered” will be displayed.
  

  

When Attendance Submission = “Allow Partial”:

• Attendance can be submitted even if some students' attendance is not marked.

Important Fields