Model Your Academic Calendar

Model Your Academic Calendar

Similar to how you create an account hierarchy to model your institutional structure, you create a hierarchy of Term records to model the academic year. A Term record represents some period of instruction, including the start and end dates. It can represent all or part of a school year, such as a semester or quarter, a specific quarter of a semester, a mini-term, and so on.

Here's an example of Term records for Daisy Bates Academy, which follows the semester system uniformly.

Term Name	Type	Parent Term	Grading Period Sequence	Account
2020-2021 School Year	School Year	None	None	Daisy Bates Academy
2020-2021 Fall	Semester	2020-2021 School Year	1	Daisy Bates Academy
2020-2021 Spring	Semester	2020-2021 School Year	2	Daisy Bates Academy
2020-2021 Summer	Semester	2020-2021 School Year	3	Daisy Bates Academy
2020-2021 Summer Session A	Part of Term	2020-2021 Summer Session	1	Daisy Bates Academy
2020-2021 Summer Session B	Part of Term	2020-2021 Summer Session	2	Daisy Bates Academy

A Grading Period Sequence field on the Term record lets you track when a Term occurs relative to other Terms that are under the same parent Term. In our example with summer session Terms A and B, you can use 1 and 2, respectively, to track their order.

Notice that a Term is always defined in relation to an Account—the entity that administers that chunk of the schedule, so to speak. If the entire institution follows the same instructional periods, it's simple: relate all Term records to the Account that represents the institution. If some departments follow different instructional periods, then things get more complicated.

But Terms are designed to be flexible, so complicated isn't a problem for the EDA data model.

• At Connected University, the School of Law and the School of Business follow different schedules, so they design two separate hierarchies. All of the Term records in one set are related to the School of Law's Account record, and all of the ones in the other set are related to the School of Business' Account record.

• Connected University offers virtual programs in addition to in-person instruction. Virtual programs follow nontraditional intake cycles, accommodating enrollment every six to eight weeks. Term intervals can be as short as you need them to be.

• At Daisy Bates Academy, a special immersion program runs for an extended period and overlaps with the regular Term that non-immersion students follow. It's fine to have Terms with overlapping dates.