Planner

Planning a programme or paper is an extensive business.  The documentation here is divided into two parts, one to explain the philosophy or theory of curriculum design and planning which we use here, and the second as a more practical how-to for the most common operations.  Even though I know it’s unlikely you will, I’d really suggest you read the theory first before clicking a whole load of buttons …

What’s a planner?

Planners have the ability to create and edit programmes. A department or faculty may nominate a couple of people to act as planners, or you may have dedicated learning or programme designers for this purpose.  Because of the impact of the changes they’re able to make, the number of planners per programme should be kept small.  By default, department/faculty heads and superusers also have the same abilities as planners.

There are two ways to tell if you have planning permissions.  First, you’ll see a link in your header bar labelled Programme Planning, and secondly, you’ll see the programmes to which you have access listed in the Toolkits and permissions tab of your personal profile page.  For more information on permissions, please read the documentation here.

Quick start: What’s a programme and how can I make one?

In Compass a programme is basically a collection of papersets, and (before you ask), a paperset is the umbrella for the semester instances of papers which have the same code.   If all you need to do is add to Compass a collection of existing papersets (for example, from an existing programme of study), it’s a very quick business.

  1. Create a new programme in Compass
  2. Add or edit the papers in a programme
  3. Organise the time schedule of papers in a programme
  4. Add or edit graduate attributes to a programme

Once that’s done, congratulations, your programme is finished.  From this point you can begin to analyse it for future improvements using the mapping functionality.

  1. Map programme attributes

Curriculum planning and design

If you’re intending to create a whole new programme or redesign an existing one – whether it’s inside Compass or not – you’ll need to understand a bit more about how the planning toolkit works.  Below are the steps of the theory and the parallel steps of how to put them into practice in Compass.

Theory and introduction

Practical How-To in Compass
  1. Theory of programme design in Compass
  2. Understanding trajectories
  3. Understanding milestones
  4. Understanding alignment in assessment
  5. Understanding access skills
  1. Creating a new programme in Compass
  2. Creating trajectories
  3. Managing existing milestones
  4. Creating new milestones
  5. Planning assessments and activities
  6. Reporting on access skills