How to create a course stage
Introduction
Course stages are very simple to create, however, care should be taken with formatting, and there are some features to be aware of.
Creating a Course Stage content type
Course Stage content types should always be created within the main section of a course. Most courses will require at least three stages, which should be grouped together and placed in the order in which you wish them to appear.
If we take an accounting course, for example, we can see four Course Stages listed at the bottom of the main course section, listed in order.
This ordering is important, especially as we get to more complex courses with multiple pathways:
As you can see above, for courses with multiple pathways, Course Stage content must be grouped by Pathway and then Year
Completing a Course Stage content type
The Course Stage content type is very simple consisting of only a few fields.
Name
This is the name used to reference the content type. It is not displayed on the website so, to an extent, it doesn’t particularly matter what this is, however, we use the format of [Pathway] - [Year] for consistency. For example, the name might be ‘Marketing - Year 1’
Pathway
Pathways are a little bit like groups for stages. Some of our courses give learners the option to choose different sets of modules or specialisms. These are called ‘pathways’. Course stages with the same Pathway name will be grouped together under a drop-down menu for example here we have Year 1, Year 2, and Year 3 modules all with the same Pathway name “Marketing”:
It is very important that the pathway name that you use for each group is identical including any punctuation or capitalisation or T4 will treat them as different pathways, so ‘Marketing’ and ‘marketing’ are not the same.
Core Modules / Optional Modules
Every stage will be made up of a combination of core and optional modules. The process for adding these is very simple. Modules are added as a comma-separated list of module codes. So, for example
5MK525,5MK511,5MK512,5MK524
There are some important things to note: the list must not contain spaces, line breaks, or any other punctuation other than commas
Completion
Once you have completed your course stages, preview the course content type to ensure that your modules are listed as you expect them to be, and once satisfied either Save, or if you are a moderator, Save And Approve the course stage.
Repeat the above process for all stages/pathways
Common issues
There are a couple of common issues that you may come across when completing stages.
Duplicated Modules
You may find that a module appears more than once in your stage. This is usually the result of a duplicated module in the T4 module repository. Raise a ticket with digital support to see if the duplicate can be removed
Missing Modules
You may find that modules are missing from your stage. There can be several reasons for this. Firstly, the module may have been inactive or not attached to any courses when it was migrated. These modules may be in our archive section. Secondly, the module may have been missed. We migrated over four-thousand modules for the undergraduate courses. Although we completed a QA process, it is possible that some modules were missed in the migration and still need to be added. Thirdly, the module is new and has not completed QA yet. We are not permitted to add modules to the site unless they have been through the full University QA process. Most modules, prior to QA completion are not in a state where we could add them to the website. In any event, if a module is missing, you should raise a ticket to digitalsupport@derby.ac.uk so we may investigate.
Adding / Removing Modules
To add and remove modules to a stage, simply append or delete the code from the list in Core modules or Optional modules field. Remember to remove any extra commas left over. For example, to remove 5MK524 from the following list:
5MK525,5MK511,5MK512,5MK524
Simply delete it from the items:
5MK525,5MK511,5MK512
Note that I have removed the trailing comma.