Availabilities

Availabilities describe when, where and how courses, units and theses are delivered to students. Each availability also holds information about the types of students who can be admitted or enrolled.

‘Study package’ is the generic term used to define what is taught at Curtin. Courses, units, theses, majors, minors, streams are all different types of study packages. Depending on the type of study package, different information is collected and different rules apply. As an example, a course does not need to have tuition pattern information but a unit does.

Course, unit and thesis availabilities are created to allow students to be admitted to courses and enrolled in units and theses. Majors, minors and streams do not require availabilities. Availabilities contain the information about where (e.g. Perth City campus) and when (e.g. Semester 1, 2008) the courses and units will be offered. Once an availability is created, students can be admitted to a course or enrolled in a unit.

An availability defines

where - e.g. Bentley Campus, Metro College Malaysia [location]
when - e.g. 2008, semester 2 [year and study period]
for whom - e.g. for domestic fee paying full time students studying by extension internally[liability category, load category, study mode, attendance mode] and
by whom - e.g. owned by the Department of Mathematics, taught by Information Systems [owning and teaching organisations]

the course or unit is offered.

Information about quotas and tuition patterns is also recorded on availabilities. Quota information can be used to control admission into courses and enrolment in units and theses. Tuition pattern and class size information is used to timetable the different activities recorded for unit availabilities, such as lectures, tutorials and laboratories and is subsequently used for class registration.

Availabilities also contain dates which control when information can be processed. For example courses have a last date to admit students, units have a last date to enrol, a teaching census date, a last date to withdraw etc. Only authorised users with a high level of access are permitted to override these dates.