Courses and Course Sections

Create and maintain courses, course instances, and course sections across academic periods. Define the core course details once, then configure each course instance with a start and end academic period that controls when the instance should be referenced based on time context. Associate course sections with the appropriate course instance based on the academic period in which each section is offered.

Institutions can maintain the history and future evolution of a course while keeping course sections aligned to the correct effective course configuration. This reduces setup ambiguity, supports downstream processes that need period-aware course data, and gives administrators a cleaner path for course configuration maintenance when a change would conflict with existing course sections.

Steps to enable and configure

You don't need to do anything to enable this feature.

Tips and considerations

  • Course instance start and end academic periods should include the academic periods for existing sections. If a section exists in an affected range, users receive clearer guidance when the instance period cannot be changed.
  • The Create Course Section action is disabled when there are unsaved changes on the page.
  • During course-section creation, available academic periods are limited to periods associated with the selected course instance and with a start date on or after the current date.
  • A descriptive text type cannot be added more than once to the same course instance.

Access requirements

Use the following duty roles or configure your own using similar permissions:

  • Course Configurator: view course details, create courses, edit course instance periods, duplicate courses or instances, delete courses or instances, and maintain course details.
  • Course Setup Viewer: view configured course details. 
  • Course Section Configurator: view course section details, create course sections, duplicate course sections, delete course sections, and maintain course section details.
  • Course Section Viewer: view configured course section details