The academic year

Let's imagine you work in a university in Europe. Every year, teachers teach new courses, but every year there is also a great number of courses which do not evolve much. These courses from last year could be recycled and used with the new group of fresh students coming in this year.

Without session, you'd have two options. The first one is to copy the course:

• copy the course to a new course, duplicate the 50MB of space (over and over),

• assign maybe another teacher and

• find a new course code that fits the fact that it's not entirely the same course but it's not really different either

• have your previous students remain with the previous course in their listing because it's not been “expired”

The other option is to clean the course up:

• remove all students from course

• remove all useless forums

• remove all useless wiki pages

• have your previous students remain without any access to the course they took last year

With the sessions, you change a little bit how it works:

• you define a session that spans the whole semester from January 2011 to July 2011

• you register 10 courses to it

• you register teachers responsible for these courses

• you register students in the session

This brings the following advantages:

• teachers can add content to the basic courses registered, but they cannot remove from them, and what they add is only visible to their students

• students must only be registered once to the whole 10 courses

• students will still have access to these courses after the semester is finished, but these courses will appear in their “sessions history”, which is on another page

• when you check the results or the forums, you will never have to distinct groups of students mixing up inside your course, because you selected a specific session to review