| Overview | Importing This File |
| Video Explaining This File | What Data Can Be Updated |
| Populating This File | Products That Use This File |
| Next: Courses | |
Overview
This file establishes your institutions academic calendar.
The decisions made in building this file impact the user experience across the platform, most commonly by populating drop-down menus for selecting a given term’s data. If too many terms are imported before they are needed, these menus can become unnecessarily long.
Video Explaining the Academic Terms File
Best Practices for Populating Academic Terms
When building this file, consider how your academic year runs (Fall to Summer? Summer to Spring?) and which terms need to be accessible to your users.
TermIdentifier Source
The term identifiers defined in this file are used to assign sections to the terms in which they occur. These identifiers MUST be present in the SIS in a way that can be mapped to sections. When building the Academic Terms file, assess which identifiers are used on the tables that define sections.
Levels and Parentage
Because this file establishes a hierarchical structure, each term must have a parent identifier linking it to the annual term or semester to which it belongs. Each level of the hierarchy also has a type, defined by an enumerated value as listed in the data dictionary. Only Annual type terms should have a blank ParentIdentifier. Child terms should have begin and end dates that fall within the dates of the parent term.
Term Logic
Creating all terms for the year at once can lead to a cluttered user experience, so best practice is to create terms as needed. Terms must be created before sections can be loaded, so this file should be created before a given term before the rest of that term’s data.
Suggested SIS Tables
Important Information About Importing This File
Import Order
Academic Terms must be imported before course section data is imported.
What Data Can Be Updated
Once an Academic Term is created it cannot be deleted. It is important to have your file as accurate as possible before it is imported. The Name, BeginDate, EndDate, ParentIdentifier and Type of an Academic Term can be updated by importing an updated file with the new information.
File Size
Academic Term files can be up to 20MB in size when importing manually via sFTP or manually.
Products That Use Academic Terms
| Product | Required | Optional | Not Applicable |
| Baseline - Rubrics |  |
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| Beacon |  |
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| Course Evaluations | |
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| Engage | |
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| Insight | |
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| Outcomes | |
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| Planning | |
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