Changes with Course Term Availability
There are many changes occurring concerning which terms courses will be available in, both temporary and permanent. The course navigator used to assume course availability based on last completed academic year (2019), which would no longer show accurate data.
Start Year Property:
In order to represent course availability as it changes over different years, calendars now have an adjustable "Start Year" property. The default start year, which will be used when loading templates, can be changed in settings.
The start year can be changed at anytime and term titles will adjust to show what year they are in. Start year will saved if exported, and any calenders exported before this update will have 2019 as their start year until changed.
How Course Term Availability Will Show:
For terms which have data regarding what courses are offered, that data is shown for those respective terms and years (currently data up to and including spring 2021 is available).
For future terms (past spring 2021), course availability is assumed based on the most recent of that term which has data. To help reduce confusion, assumed unavailability is shaded differently then regular unavailability.
Cases To Watch Out For (Examples):
ENSC 120 is not being offered in the fall 2020 term, this is most likely temporary. The navigator will unfortunately show all fall terms after 2020 as assumed unavailable as it does not know if the change temporary or not.
MATH 310 is no longer being offered, as of fall 2020, it will be known as MATH 260. The navigator will show MATH 310 as unavailable for both fall 2020 and spring 2021 as the course no longer exists. However for summer 2021, there is no data, so it will look at summer 2020 and assume the course will also be offered in all following summers.
MATH 260, the replacement for MATH 310, suffers from a similar issue. As the course wasn't available in summer 2020, it will show as assumed unavailable in all following summers despite the course most likely to be offered in all terms.
Some courses in the templates will show a warning on load; BPK308 (biomedical eng.), PHYS 211, PHYS 233, PHYS 344 (physics eng.) due to either a permanent change or one of the cases mentioned above.
In order to help with planning when the navigator may be wrong about course availability, the option to suppress the term availability warning for a specific course has been added (located on right panel under the selected course name). Other warnings such as requisite or credit requirements will still show.
Warning suppressions are only for the current session and are not saved if exported, so if you lose track of which courses are suppressed, saving and reloading will show them again.
I know that the current state of this feature is less than ideal, but I chose to not start manually covering up exceptions, as it is better to show uncertainty than to be incorrect. If you have any suggestions for improvements to this or any other aspect of the navigator, feel free to send them using the feedback menu.
- 2020/09/08