Re-enrolment within the same school year

Administration
1

Hello everyone,

I’m looking for some guidance on how to best manage student enrolments for multiple programmes within the same School Year in Gibbon.

Here’s our situation:

  • Our institution offers several academic programmes, which form a natural progression.

  • We also run specialization courses, which can be taken after completing any of the main programmes — sometimes even simultaneously.
    For example, a student might be enrolled in a programme running from September 2023 to June 2024, and then take a specialization course from April 2024 to May 2024.

  • Each programme has its own Year Groups and Form Groups.

The challenge we’re facing is that Gibbon only allows one enrolment per School Year.

If a student completes an academic programme and is marked as Left, we can’t re-enrol them into another Year Group (that is, an specialization course) within the same School Year, even though both courses are running during overlapping periods.

We’ve considered creating a new School Year for these specialization courses, but that complicates things when defining which year is Current, Past, or Upcoming, since these courses don’t follow the standard academic calendar.

Is there a recommended approach or best practice for handling this type of modular or overlapping programme structure?

Thank you very much for your help and insights — we really appreciate how flexible Gibbon is, and we’d love to find the cleanest way to represent our students’ academic history.

Best,

2

Hi @jvalero This is an interesting situation, which I can appreciate is different than the common case that Gibbon was designed for, which tends to have a single enrolment for the year. The reason for a single enrolment per school year is complex, and so deeply ingrained into how Gibbon works, it wouldn’t quite be feasible to change. Similarly for school years, the system doesn’t easily support more than one at a time.

One way to handle this could be to have a year group or form group called “Specialization”, and rather than unenrolling the student and marking them as left, edit their enrolment and change it to the new group. As you mention, the only downside would be preserving academic history. A way to help preserve this could be to find an alternate means of recording it, such as a Student Note, or Custom Field.

3

Hi, @sandra Thank you very much for sharing your perspective. I’ll give it a thought along with my colleagues and see how we can figure this out.

Best,

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