Course Transcripts Clarifications

Hi there,

At Landing Zone we're working on some SIS integrations for CourseTranscripts and I have some clarification questions around some of the fields and built-in descriptors for version 3.2b. This is a blocker for us right now.

Thanks,

Patrick

• Course Codes
• Here are the fields that seem interrelated:
• Course Reference → educationOrganizationId: 
• AssigningOrganizationIdentificationCode: The organization code or name assigning the course identification code. 
• CourseCatalogueURL: The URL for the course catalog that defines the course identification code.

• What is the difference between the first two? What is an example of a case where the AssigningOrganizationIdentificationCode would be different from the course reference ed org id?
• What use case led to this CourseCatalogueURL field being a thing? Is this a common thing? Is this often hosted by the school district?
• There are also these alternativeCourseIdentificationCodes. What is the use case here? Is this intended to catch cross-listed course numbers provided by a LEA (I remember in university sometimes the same actual course would be listed as two different courses depending on your department or something) or to include the local course code and a state course code or what?

• Credit Type
• Two fields, attempted_credit_type and earned_credit_type
• This field accepts a creditType descriptor
• Here are some descriptors:
• Adult education credit
• Career and Technical Education credit
• Carnegie unit
• Nine month year hour credit
• Semester hour credit
• Trimester hour credit
• Quarter hour credit

• A school we’re working with has trimesters and the following course/credit combinations are possible
• A single trimester course worth 0.25 credits
• A single trimester course worth 0.5 credits
• A two trimester course worth 0.5 credits for each trimester
• A three trimester course worth 0.33 credits for trimesters 1 and 2 and 0.34 credits for trimester 3

• I don’t quite understand what the purpose of this field is or how to assign descriptors to the different courses for the school above.
• What value is this supposed to provide? I was thinking that there should be a different descriptor for 0.25, 0.33, 0.34, and 0.5 credit courses for the school, but in that case it would just be a second categorization for a delineation already created by attempted_credits
• How are these default descriptors conceived? What’s the difference between a Nine month year hour credit and a trimester hour credit for a school with three trimesters and a nine month year?

• How would you assign this field for this school?

• External Education Organization ID: We have a school who uses rosetta stone for spanish - would we need to set them up as an ed_org in the edfi database - what id would we use? How does this work with interoperability?
• Education Organization ID for Student Reference
• Should this just always be the ed org where the student is currently enrolled or should it ideally be the ed org where the student did the course work (for example if the transcript record represents a transfer credit)