Introduction to the Pre-College Programs section on sva.edu 4.0

An overview of the process for integrating Colleague data into sva.edu 4.0 for the Pre-College Programs.

Prior to the redesign launched in December 2019, publishing a Pre-College semester was a time-consuming and complex affair, requiring the manual input of html. With the sva.edu redesign launched in December 2019, this process will now be much more streamlined. As is true of all course processes on sva.edu, we have worked closely with the Registrar’s office and Academic Affairs to make Colleague (the database which contains course registration data) the “single source of truth” for course data.

The course data that is imported into Colleague is refreshed every hour. That means that changes in Colleague will be reflected on the site with a delay. Depending on when you make your change, it may take nearly two hours for changes to be reflected

(like if you just missed an import). Since, to the extent that it’s possible, Colleague will be a single source of truth, the most fundamental parts of courses will not be editable within the CMS. The fields that will be controlled in Colleague include: title, date range, cost, whether the course is open for registration, the description for the course, and the course’s section code (which can come in handy for identifying courses in Colleague or within the CMS course listings.

Another important concept to understand about the way the course sections work is that all courses connected to a section will display the same supplementary information. As an example, the section (in Colleague-speak) ANP-0201-A is offered both in the 2019 and 2020 summer semesters. Any content added to the course section of either course will also be added to the other. Meaning, if you were to add a multimedia gallery of student work to the course associated with the Summer 2019 semester, you would also be adding it to the Summer 2020 semester. The reason for this system is to ensure that any additional content added to courses will show up again for future semesters. The hope is that this will drastically cut the workload for setting up future semesters.