Attain perfect schedule parity with addition of SIS section identifiers

Dealing with the trailing section IDs on course codes is a ticklish issue for a few reasons. For most schools, the specific section IDs get issued by the parent system, which happens after the ofCourse work is complete. With this latest update, your ofCourse schedules can now have absolute course-code parity with the schedules presented through your parent system.

There has been a longish conversation about whether or not there was enough value in porting those parent-issued section IDs back to ofCourse. But then a curious thing happened. We ran into a few schools responsible for setting the specific section IDs. This development changed the debate in a pretty significant way. The biggest thing to come out of it was our need to support section IDs in ofCourse.

A happy benefit of this work was that we could now easily support section IDs whether we set them in ofCourse or they were coming from somewhere else. With a little extra polish at the end of the line, you can now achieve exact parity, right down to the trailing section ids. Like many ofCourse features, this is optional but available for those who need or want it. So once again, the need of a few benefits the many.

Existing users can find this new feature under Step 5 / Manage SIS Section IDs. If things aren’t perfectly intuitive, you can always pop over to the accompanying How Do I doc, which will walk you through the new feature.