Warning about Merged Course Rosters

If you’ve merged two or more sections of the same course, do not enable any of the original courses (whose rosters were merged). If you enable them, students will see the original courses (in their Courses nugget) in addition to the merged course. The end result is confusion for the student and the possibility that you may have student activity in both the original and the merged courses (which cannot be combined).

Merged Rosters Idiosyncrasy

We’ve discovered a small issue when we merge rosters for two or more sections of a course. During the roster merge process, we can place students on teams based on the original section in which they are enrolled (e.g., students in section 350 are enrolled on a team called "Section 350," students in Section 351 are enrolled on a team called “Section 351” and so on).

By default, this is how we setup a course with a merged roster at JCCC. This enables the instructor to keep separate all or part of the activities of students assigned to the original course sections. However, new students who are added to the original sections after the rosters are merged are not automatically assigned to any team (the instructor must handle this manually). We’ve contacted ANGEL to inquire whether this is a bug or functioning as designed?

What We Know about Merging Rosters

Requests to have course rosters merged (that is for rosters of different sections of the same class to be combined) must be approved by the instructor’s Assistant Dean or Dean at JCCC. The request is then forwarded from the Assistant Dean or Dean to the Academic Director of the Educational Technology Center (Jonathan Bacon) or the Assistant Dean of Distance Learning (Ed Lovitt).

ANGEL Help states the following regarding the Merged Roster Manager states: “You can create a new merged course that is automatically synchronized with the rosters of other selected courses for which you have editing rights.”

1. Merging Rosters creates a new “empty” course shell. Specifically: a) No mail is inherited from the source courses, b) No activity (grades, log-ins) are inherited, c) No content is copied to the merged roster course shell and d) All content must be added after the merge.
2. Merging rosters creates a single roster in the new course with all students that were enrolled in any one of the original source courses. While students are automatically merged into the new course roster, Course Editors and Teaching Assistants are not. They must be manually added.
3. When merging two or more course sections, the original courses are disabled. The original source courses still exist and are accessible to the Course Editor but not to students. Further, the original courses are no longer accessible using the Course Search.
4. When combining two or more courses, Groups are automatically created with membership based on the original course in which the student was enrolled. The Groups will be named based on the section of the original course, e.g., Section 350 and Section 352.
5. When merging rosters, you must give the new course a title. Standard operating procedure at JCCC is to use the same title as the original courses but add both sections and CRNs at the end of the title, such as ACCT-121 Sections 350 & 351 (12345 & 54321).
6. The merged roster course will inherit the same category (e.g., Spring 2009 or SD 2009) as the source courses. That means they’ll be grouped in the correct semester.
7. Generally, once two or more course shells are merged, they will not be un-merged (all content added to the merged course and student activity is lost)
8. Courses cannot be merged or merged courses deleted/unmerged after any student activity has occurred.