COURSE MANAGEMENT | categories

Defining Hierarchy of Category - Class

This overview also tells you how each component of Lumens relates to others within the system. These components and the processes they operate under will become clearer once you have a little experience working in Lumens.

The hierarchy of elements in the online course catalog is a very important feature of the Lumens system. The course/class hierarchy ensures that all necessary elements of a class are in place before it is offered. It also prevents you from accidentally deleting catalog data. Understanding how the hierarchy affects the organization of system elements make creating and managing classes faster and easier for you. There are both vertical and horizontal elements to the course/class hierarchy. The vertical hierarchy operates from the top down. For example, before you can create classes you must have created an appropriate course, subcategory, and category. The vertical hierarchy provides the organization for your online course catalog. The horizontal hierarchy does not provide organization for the catalog, but provides the necessary elements for a class to function: instructors, locations, and term. As you can see, all of these “horizontal” elements are also required before you can create a class.

Before classes can be created, all the elements that lie above them except for in the hierarchy must be created. The same is true for courses and subcategories; they all follow a top down structure. You will also see that as we get lower down in the hierarchy, more detailed information will be required for the creation of elements.

The categories function of the system is flexible, allowing for as many categories as you need. However, before creating categories in your website, you will want to consider how categories are used in your paper course catalog. You should also consider the layout of the online course catalog. Having too many categories creates an awkward display that doesn’t fit within the screen, forcing the student to scroll left and right to see all the categories. As the largest division of your website, a category should be fairly broad in its content.

Hierarchy Chart

Defining Terms

An element refers to any component of the system that can be created or edited by an administrator. All of the items in this list are elements.
Catalog - The broadest division of classes in your online course display. All other elements of your course display reside “underneath” the catalog level.
Category - The second broadest division of courses, behind catalog. A category is meant to cover large groups such as “adults” or “children,” or cover a general field of study such as “science.”
Class - An individual instance of a course, with an assigned instructor, location, start and end date, and meeting times. This is the element that students register for.
Course - An offering covering a specific topic. Courses define the “topic” for classes, which reside beneath them.
Course Series - A set of related classes that are grouped together. Course Series can have a special price to be used when a customer registers for all courses in the series at once.
Subcategory - Subcategories contain further divisions of a category. A subcategory might be a more detailed breakdown of a group, as “seniors” would be a more detailed division of “adults.” Subcategories can also include a specific type of class, such as “computers.”
Term - A calendar period defined by the administrator which serves the same purpose as a semester, trimester, or quarter at a college or university. The term serves as a boundary for when classes are offered and displayed within the web catalog.