Setup

The setup of domain (Campus-School-Department) identifiers, labels, and association is performed through the Admin > System > Domains page.

Note: While Campus, School, and Department are the default labels, they can be adjusted to match your organization. What's important is that these triplets match how you want to segment mid-level permissions, which is often consistent with the authoritative structure of your institution.

Creating Domains

To introduce a new domain, enter a common name (e.g. Downtown), its external identifier (e.g. DWTN), and press Create. Campuses and Schools can be created independently, whereas Departments must be created within a single school.

The common name is what will show up in various places around the system, such as on the top of the syllabus, in advanced search drop-downs, and when assigning domain permissions.

The external ID is what will be used during feed processing to uniquely identify in what domain the course will belong. Therefore, external IDs must be unique.

Finally, once a series of schools and departments have been created, you will see a list of all of the Schools within each Campus. In order to associate a particular School with a particular Campus, simply click Add next to the name of the school. This will control at which campuses schools have a presence. This association will happen automatically if you are using feed processing. Please note that before you can successfully assign domain permissions, Schools must be associated with the respective Campus(es), or the permission settings will not be correctly applied. You can also add Schools to multiple campuses.

Note: Though technically not a traditional part of the organization, it is typical to introduce a domain called "Templates" (external ID = TMPL) so that you may segment a group of administrative users who have access to managing the template set. If a small group of people will be centrally managing templates, it is easiest to add a "Template" campus, school, and department. If a larger group will that will be managing a subset of the template set, then only a "Template" campus should be introduced but then that campus should be associated with all of your schools.

Updating Domains

Before making a change to a campus, school, or department, it is helpful to understand the impact such a change may have. Changing the common name is relatively harmless, though it should be noted that this change will apply to all existing courses already in the domain as well as those who are are assigned domain permissions within it.

However, changes to the external ID can have a greater impact. Since this is what feed processing relies upon, a change of the external ID must be coordinated with whomever is responsible for feed creation and processing. This is particularly important if automated feed processing is being used, as a mismatch of identifiers will cause processing of some courses to break or duplication to occur until they are realigned. Therefore, in some cases it may make more sense to create a new domain in place of changing the current name and external ID.

To modify the name or external ID for a campus, school, or department, simply make the change, simply click Update.

Note: When you add or update domains in Concourse, you will also have to update the domain permissions for the appropriate users! You can do this by going to Admin > Users and searching for users by name, system permission or domain permission.

Deleting Domains

The removal of a campus, school, or department has the same possible impacts as modifying the external ID. If feed processing is being used, when an invalid domain is found the row will not be processed. Therefore, take care when removing domains.

Should you still want to completely remove a campus, school, or department from your system, you first need to make sure all of the courses that are associated with that domain are either moved to another or deleted. Begin by searching for courses within the domain your are looking to remove. Then, if you are an administrator of that domain, you can make the swap from the Settings > Course > Edit Required Information page within the course. Alternatively you can click Mark for Deletion and subsequently visit the Purge Courses area to completely remove the course. You can also use a course feed to update the campus and department information for any syllabus.

Once all courses have been moved over, you can delete the campus or department. To remove a school, all departments must be removed first.

If after removing all courses you are still unable to completely remove the campus, school, or department, there may be one or more hidden courses still within that domain. To see if this is the case, you can run a Hidden Course report in the Reports area of your system to identify these courses and either un-hide them or delete them entirely if applicable. 

Moving Domains

Moving an existing department to a new or existing school requires some additional steps to ensure that this process goes as smoothly as possible. To move a department to a different school, you will need to first create a "new" department within that school before you can update the syllabus domain information. Please note that departments can have the same name but not the same external ID. For this reason, we recommend the following steps:

• Add the "new" department to the respective school by typing in the common name and the external ID and then clicking on Create. The "new" department must have a unique external ID.
  
  • We also recommend, for ease of use, that the common name of the "new" department be unique as well, so you can easily identify it in the list of departments in the search area or in the required course information area.

• Once the "new" department has been added, you can either manually re-categorize each syllabus by accessing Settings > Course > Edit required information. You can also process a course feed to update the department information on syllabi; we recommend this if you have more than 10 to 20 syllabi that need to be updated. 

Make sure to update domain permissions for any domain administrator, editor, auditor, or reporter from "old" to the "new" department from the Admin > Users area. 

When you are finished with this process you will be able to go in and delete the "old" department.

Bulk Domains

If you have a large number of campuses, schools, or departments, it may be advantageous to utilize a feed to create or update domain information. 

Please note that deleting and moving domains cannot be done via feed processing.