COURSE INVENTORY Table - Data Element Index . Tables and Data Elements . Student Records Data Home . Data Warehouse Home

COURSE INVENTORY Table

(dwadmin.course_inventory)

Explanation

Gives the first and last terms every course was (or will be) offered, as well as the new Course_Id by which the course came to be known (if any). Contains one record for each course that has been offered (for the period SRS covers), for each period it was offered. For example, a course will have two entries if it was offered once in Summer 1990, and again from Fall 1993 and after. In SRS, a course must be in the Course Inventory before any course sections may be created in a particular term. COURSE_INVENTORY allows looking at courses over time, even when renumbering of courses or other administrative actions may change a course's id. The table has records of courses which started back to the 1940's (and in one case Spring of 1912).

Common Uses

• Finding the Department of Record for a specific course
• Finding courses that were previously offered with a different title
• Reporting on the Distribution Requirement for specified courses

Cautions

• Some course sections have been offered in SRS for terms that are outside the range defined by the Start and End terms in the COURSE_INVENTORY. This is a known problem, and affects over 600 historical records.
• Old_Course_Id is currently always null in the warehouse.
• The course title from the inventory is used as the default when a course section is created in SRS, but it can be over-written each term. Thus the course title in the COURSE_SECTION table may not be the same as the title for that same course id in the COURSE_INVENTORY table.
• Not everything in the SRS Course Inventory is extracted to the COURSE_INVENTORY table in the warehouse.

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