Updates to Course Plans

The Advisement Database Committee recommended a variety of changes to the Course Plan that were recently implemented on the system. You may have noticed some of these changes if you have accessed/created new Course Plans over the past several days. Here is a summary of the most notable changes made:

• The "Notes" field has been renamed "Important information, please read" and was expanded to give you more room to review your comments. Also, the list of insertable comments available on the Advisement Sheet is now available on the Course Plan. This is a stock list of common advising phrases and policies that can be inserted with just a click.
  
• A new field has been added to Label your course plans. The label will appear in the advising history view. This will help you identify different Course Plans you may have mapped out for the student, such as: "Theatre major with IR minor", "Three-year graduation plan", or "Plan including Study Abroad".
  
• A field has also been added for the Expected Graduation Date. This field will default to the student's current DTRACK term, but the field can be edited on the Course Plan before saving.
  
• Similar to the Advisement Sheet, text with the "this is not an official document" phrasing and signature lines have been added to the bottom of the Course Plan.
  
• You can now share a Course Plan with the student on myUSC! A checkbox below the student's name and ID number allows you to Share on myUSC. The student can then access the Course Plan on the Advisement tab in myUSC. Only one Course Plan per program will be available to the student as a PDF. An icon for myUSC will appear next to the currently shared Course Plan in the advising history / program tab.

Speeding Up Program Tab Loading and Filtering

During the peak advising period last month, you may have experienced difficulty in getting the program tab pages to load, especially first thing in the morning. With the volume of data now stored in the Advisement Database and the way in which the advisement history pages were orginally programmed, the system was getting progressively slower in being able to generate the pages of content history for each student.

These pages were originally setup to examine, compile, and display information from a least a dozen different tables of content for the current student and program, essentially creating a report of content for the student "on the fly".

The system programmer has created a simpler way to scan through the more than 1.6 million items in the system to locate and display the appropriate content for each student. This improved the program tab loading and filtering in testing to be about 15x faster. Hopefully, you have noticed these pages loading a little bit quicker!